Fences? Check. Rabbits? Check.
I’m not talking to Paddy, Paddy, Paddy or any of the other rabbits called Paddy. Scarily, the lovely J who rehomes the greyhounds came this evening with her partner, C, to check us out to make sure we’re suitable ‘parents’ for the pretty fawn girl. And I don’t mean J is scary, it’s just that we’ve somewhat fallen in love with B, our little doe-eyed doggy-missile and have taken to referring to her as though she’s ours already. I’ve even been checking out the doggy-snoods online for when she gets a bit nippy. Naturally, being a tad dysfunctional, we were worried we wouldn’t pass.
So we rushed around tidying up (not easy when you’ve not totally unpacked and hubby had sucked a sock up into the hoover so it wasn’t working) and then spent ten minutes charging around the garden having excessively loud and pointless conversations with each other in order to scare the rabbits away.
Finally, their car pulled up and we braced ourselves for our inspection (#1 had even had a shower and offered poor J a sniff of his armpits as proof – poor girl). We spent at least the first fifteen minutes bombarding the startled pair with every question that we’d been mulling over for the last couple of days: will she skid on the hard floors, does she really have Marmite for breakfast (#1 noticed her breath smelt of Marmite when he knelt down to cuddle her), what if she runs away, what if she doesn’t like us, what if she can’t understand our English accents (she’s Irish, duh), …
We weren’t too worried about safety, having access to more security measures than most high security prisons (we think the previous owner may have been nervous – there’s motion sensors in every room, a big flash alarm system, huge metal pointy gates down the drive, oh and the electric fence of course), more that J and C would somehow detect the air of insanity about us and write us off as unstable. The worst bit was when we wandered out to the garden and suddenly, having not reared their fluffy heads all day, there were rabbits everywhere, patently sabotaging our otherwise perfectly dog-friendly set-up. I’m sure it was just to taunt us. I mean, how would J&C let us have a greyhound when there are hundreds of little furry temptations dotting the garden? I started my diversion technique ‘er look, we’ve got a trampoline!’ but obviously the devious little devils were expecting that and countered by bounding conspicuously across the drive just where we were standing.
Happily, I needn’t have worried. C informed me that yes, B may well chase the rabbits but the only bad thing that would come of that would be a dead rabbit. So no harm done then. Apparently it’s not terrible temptation to home a greyhound near wild rabbits, you just have to act totally unimpressed if she brings one back to you, tail wagging, as a sort of ready-wrapped pressie and she’ll soon get the message.
So we passed! Ha. Take that, fluffy sods.
