...bathing a rabbit.

…In fact, if I were still a Girl Guide I would probably have gained my ‘rabbit handling’ badge – assuming there was one, of course. There were badges for pretty much everything, so there probably was. I am presuming they still do badges. I will have to look into it as I am now interested! Of course, if I were still a Girl Guide, I’d have had to have had my uniform let out a little at the seams.

Actually, to back track a little – I don’t expect there really were badges for “everything” – that would be hideous. I now have an image of hoards of blue skirted, blue hatted little girls terrorising the community by practicing their arson, or their machine-gun handling. So I should say they had badges for most “nice” things. Cooking, sewing, saving people’s lives and, of course, tying boy scouts to trees with piano wire, smearing them with jam and leaving them to be eaten by ants.

Ah – I am showing my age now. No doubt the uniform is slightly more practical than the blue mini-skirt of the late 60s/early 70s, and they are no longer called Girl Guides and Boy Scouts. They will be Guides and Scouts – less sexist, more PC. I think Brownies is still going – though I was never a Brownie. I went once with my friend Tracy, but we were going to be 10 the next week, so we went straight to Guides, and never found out what they did with the secret toadstools that were kept in the cupboard, that we caught sight of when they were clearing away – they were quite big, and not real toadstools I should also add – I am not for one minute suggesting that Brown Owl was some sort of drug crazed maniac, high on magic mushrooms, but it cannot be ruled out entirely.

I think I would have liked to be a Brownie. The uniform was crap, but I would have been a Sprite. That sounds enormous fun, doesn’t it? Guides was OK (I was a daffodil). I got my emergency helper badge – but I think that one had to be renewed every two years, but I kept the badge because we moved away. The only other badges I’ve had were for swimming (400 metres – which isn’t far really, but I had only learnt to swim two weeks previously) and my Grade 1 ice-skating – both when I was about 11. For Grade One you had to “skate forward and stop”. I never managed grade two because we moved away, again, and to be honest had I gone every week from then till now I still would never have mastered the somewhat dubious art of skating backwards. I do like to see where I am going – especially when participating in potentially dangerous activities.

But anyway, I digress, the rabbit is now bathed and looking decidedly un-masculine, he is extremely fluffed up and resembles a dandelion clock. To say he enjoyed his bath would be a bit of an exaggeration; in fact to say he tolerated it would be as well. However, I think he realised quite early on that it would be futile to struggle – there was no escape.