I, Rabbit

Christmas Eve. An uneasy calm settles over the planet… The school holidays are nine days old and have been strangely marked by a paucity of internecine warfare. Yesterday Two of Two and I had a long father/son bonding day. Played chess three times, played cricket in the morning for an hour and a half and played football in the afternoon for over an hour. The football was a tight defensive struggle, characterised by long periods of stalemate, which finished 40-35 to me. Imagine if one of the games between Craig Brown’s Scotland and those football behemoths of Estonia had been played first to 40… They would not only still be playing, it’d probably still be 0-0. Maybe having to watch that will be Craig Brown’s hell when he dies. Serve him right. Or, more likely, that’ll be his heaven, and hell for the rest of us. “Well, Brian, I thought the way we advanced briefly into the Estonian half for thirteen seconds in the seventh year showed promise, but even so I was little worried that it left us exposed at the back and so that’s why I brought on another defensive midfield player.’
 
Whilst we played cricket in the morning, One of Two was in the kitchen with her wee friend – another One of Two, so perhaps we could call her One of Two Two to avoid confusion – making gingerbread cookies. Hard to keep your eye on the oven when playing for the Ashes in the back garden. An emblematic moment in the culinary disaster that was the Saturday Morning Cookie Fiasco, was to come in to find One of Two Two having poured an entire bag of floor into the bowl, using 350g as a very rough estimate. The cookies never stood a chance. When finished, none of them were eaten, and will instead be kept safe in a bag until such times as we’re beside a body of flat water and they can be used for skimming purposes.
 
So, I more or less devoted the day to the wee lad. Late in the afternoon, not long after darkness had fallen, we trudged happily inside from the field of dreams that is the mudbowl of the back (former) lawn. Unable to face the prospect of any downtime whatsoever, the wee man said, ‘can I go on the computer?’. Well, I’d been thinking that we might nip down the Speckled Band for a packet of crisps, a pint of cider and a chat about football and women, and said ‘no’. So then, raising a blunt middle finger to the day of father/son interaction, the wee man started crying and stormed out the room in a major huff. What is it they say about devoting time to your kids and the positive effect it has on them? Still, at some point he returned to apologise and we moved on. Must be the Christmas spirit.
 
The first present of the year has already been given. I wrote a few weeks ago about One of Two’s Christmas list, which featured a rabbit. She had been asking for a rabbit for some time. At this stage there was no way she was getting a rabbit. No way, not a chance, forget it.
 
She kept talking about a rabbit. Big eyes. Big, big eyes.
 
She had to do a Christmas list in her Pet Diary at school. She wrote ‘rabbit’ at the top of the list, and then the usual War and Peace-esque length of items beneath. However, she left a note for Santa at the foot of this gargantuan list which read… ‘Dear Santa, I’ve written a lot of things here, but actually I don’t want any of them, the only thing I really want is the rabbit. A rabbit is the only thing I want. Just a rabbit. Nothing else.’
 
I cracked. Classic dad-capitulating-in-the-face-of-his-wee-girl-being-cute situation. Then it transpired that some friends of ours at work had been given a rabbit and weren’t really in a position to devote enough time to it. The planets were in alignment, fate was in full swing, the gods had made up their minds. We were getting a rabbit.
 
The particulars of the handover of the merchandise dictated that we would come into possession of Patches the Netherland Dwarf (PtND) four days before Christmas. It seemed a long time to keep the wee girl locked in a cupboard, (I mean the rabbit, not One of Two) just so that we could spring the surprise on Christmas morning. She had to be handed over on the night.
 
When we told her where we were going, One of Two reacted with immediate delight, leaping into our arms and displaying all the cute little girlness that you want from your little girl. Within minutes, however, she was facing up to the prospect of getting what she wanted.
 
We went to PtND’s apartment. She was sitting on the carpet watching CNN. One of Two and PtND regarded each other with a certain trepidation. For all her desire to have a rabbit, One of Two does have an aversion to Small Things That Move, like mice, spiders and her wee brother. She stroked her, but refused to pick her up. The discovery that PtND’s claws needed snipping as they were, under all that fur, about six inches long, did not help.
 
We went home, the whole enterprise made easier by the absence of Two of Two, who was spending the night with his wee chum, Two of Three. In fact, given the size of the rabbit cage and the associated paraphernalia, there wouldn’t have been space for Two of Two in the car anyway, and we would have been in another of those tying-him-to-the-roof situations that nearly always get us in to trouble.
 
We let PtND roam around the living room. TPCKAM held her for a while, and received a massive scratch at the top of her chest for her trouble. It had the air of an accident, but maybe PtND has a vicious streak. As another friend has just pointed out, she does resemble Monty Python's killer rabbit.

 
They say that kids are always excited about getting small animals, and then the novelty wears off after a while and the poor things get left in a corner munching a carrot. Inevitably it comes down to the parents to clean out the cage then take the beast out in the evenings while watching tv, stroking its ears while it sits in your lap. Like some parody of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, in complete control of the tv remote.
 
Well, One of Two has done her best to fly in the face of this stereotype, by not being that excited in the first place. Still, as I write, she is mucking in with TPCKAM, doing that clearing up rabbit poo thing. Perhaps, after she’s got used to the shock of actually getting something she’d asked for – and after we’ve had PtND's vicious stabbing weapons of mass scratching lopped off – she will settle into a long and happy relationship with her dwarf.
 
And so Christmas is afoot, the battle lines have been drawn, and we’re now only a few hours away from that moment when the kids wake early, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of avarice.
 
Merry Christmas, dear friends! Last man standing is the winner...