Rabbits, Apricots And The Search For Architectural Competence

Into the second week of school summer holidays, and at last The Haunting of Barney Thomson is done and dusted and has been dispatched to the printers. Nine months of work, at the end of which either a very minor triumph or a wallow through the fetid sludge of literary ignominy await.

One of Two has been away on summer camp for nine days. It's obvious what this means. It has been nine days of opportunity to let the rabbit escape/eat the rabbit for lunch/shoot the rabbit and stick his head on the wall as a hunting trophy. 'Welcome home, One of Two! Guess what? We've found a new home for Budgie... above the fireplace!'

We've done none of the above. Instead, I have been Man About The House and constructed a rabbit hutch/pen type affair at the bottom of the garden. Now, I'm not the handiest. I'm more of the cerebral, literary super-genius type. At school, my woodwork teacher turned in his grave, and he wasn't even dead. However, things in the house were grim. The weather had been ugly outside, Budgie's shop-bought hutch was insubstantial, and so we'd brought him back inside. However, it wasn't long before the living room was smelling like the giraffe house at Belgrade Zoo. Something needed to be done.

(I don't mean to particularly disparage Belgrade Zoo over all others, I just happen to be very familiar with it. Giraffe houses are always minging. It's not like you ever walk into the giraffe house at a posh zoo, sniff the air, and think, 'mmm, minty...')

So on Friday Two of Two and I trooped along to the local DIY shop. I bought four planks of wood and some nails and thought I could construct a hutch. How hard can it be, I thought? I constructed the hutch. It was rubbish. It was a classic illustration of How Not To Build Anything. I could have been on tv.

'This is Douglas, he used to be a total muppet at DIY, [show scene of my house falling down and me looking rueful and/or stupid], until he started reading How To Build Stuff Without Making A Complete Knob Of Yourself, a beautiful partwork, available free every Monday morning with the Daily Mail.'

On Saturday I laid out proper architectural plans, bought screws and clips (the clips probably have a more accurate name, but I can't begin to think of what that might be, so I'll call them clips, although to be honest, they're not really clips at all, they're something else, you know a bit of metal bent at 90 degrees, and you screw one side into a plank, and the other into the other plank, and the planks join together much better than if you just nail them together which is what you do if you're a complete moron), a screwdriver, various large sheets of plastic wire type stuff, and a coil of wire to fix everything together. On Friday I was Bert and Ernie, on Saturday I was the Wolf out of Pulp Fiction. I constructed a rabbit hutch of such skill and precision, that if I built it in the centre of London it would immediately be worth in excess of seven hundred thousand pounds. I was on fire. This was rabbit hutch construction by Divine intention. The angels sang, and I had the hand of God on my shoulder throughout, as I swung the hammer, turned the screwdriver and tweaked the little bits of wire with brio, flair, elan and downright bloody-minded flamboyance. Such a shame that the new Seven Wonders of the World list has already been decided, because this would have been in there. If I could write books with the panache, verve and imagination with which I constructed that hutch, I'd be JK Rowling.

Budgie the Netherland dwarf was so excited, that he pished on me when I was carrying him to his new house. I smelled like the giraffe house at Belgrade Zoo. Unperturbed, I took my t-shirt off and put the finishing touches to Budgingham Palace, striding around in the hot afternoon sun like a bronzed god.

Now, they say pride comes before a fall, and what you would expect after such hubris would be that I came outside the following morning to find Budgie mauled and ripped to shreds by a panther, his slender, bloody leporine carcass strewn casually through the wastes of his short-lived palatial abode. Or else I would have come out to find a hole in the carefully constructed Stalag 147-esque fencing system, with Budgie waiting in someone else's garden, just so that he could flick me the bird before legging it for Freedom. Or, even more likely, the whole thing would have collapsed because I didn't screw the clips in properly, and Budgie would have been sitting in the midst of the wasted remnants of despair, greeting me with the shape of an L on his forehead.

Well, it took three days, but it was none of the above. Went out this morning to find the wee fella sitting outside his cage, casually munching grass. It wasn't entirely evident how he got out, although presumably it was by eating a hole in the one piece of the roof that came from an actual rabbit installation system. Maybe he beamed out in a Star Trek kind of a way. And he didn't seem that interested in being on the loose, perhaps remembering his previous near-death experience. But he did fix me with a look of mocking disdain as we scooped him up after a short chase round the cricket pitch.

So Budgingham Palace remains intact, and the final few holes have been sealed with 24-inch thick concrete blocks. However, since we sent him out there full time, the temperature has soared, up to the high 30's yesterday, so now I'm waiting for him to peg it through heat exhaustion before One of Two returns, and then I can face calls of 'Rabbit Killer!' for the rest of the school holidays.

You can't win, you know.

In other news... this is the time of year when I painfully await the arrival of eight or nine thousand apricots in the back garden, an event which makes this fortnight in July no less than a living Hell. Not, however, this summer. We have been blessed. Spring came early to Warsaw, as it did most of Europe. The grass began to shoot up, the trees sprang to life, the first buds of spring poked their heads tentatively out into the crisp fresh mornings. Then, however, as if encouraged by the exhortations of the gods - or, at least, the kind of gods that I'd vote for - winter snuck back up on nature and gave it a good sharp, frosty whack in the knackers. The buds died. And the ensuing, knock-on effect: the apricot season is in disarray. Instead of being Manchester United or Chelsea, it is Watford or Sheffield United, cast adrift in a sea of calumny and despair. Last year we had thousands and thousands of apricots. This year, about fifty. And they're finished. The apricots have been relegated.

Next season, should the weather not prove so willing and helpful, I'm going to sneak out one morning in April with the freezer and attach it to the base of the tree. For now I can sit back and bask in the double triumph of a rabbit hutch of unimagined magnificence - even if it isn't entirely escape-proof - and a lawn that is rich in long grass, spiders and patches of bare earth, but is mercifully clear of apricots and other diseased fruits.

Summer...it's not as bad a season as you might think.