June

[Sweder]

Slipped out for an early shuffle to the Cap with the hounds. Grey skies, wind barrelling out of the west, once again PR clamped to my lug ’oles. More eccentricity from the wonderfully dry Cooperman.

Past the stables and halfway up the eastern face of Wicker Man Hill Tess (the whippet) yelped, dived forward and picked up an object from the middle of the flattened grass trail. At first I thought it was the corpse of a rare bird. As she turned to show me I recoiled, stopped in my tracks. It was a rabbit’s head, freshly severed just below the jaw-line, the ragged tear of flesh and fur suggesting a natural predator.

Charlie was everywhere – in the gorse bushes, amongst the tall grass, behind the tree roots. The stench of malaria, madness and rabbit droppings pervaded the downland slopes; Kurtz wasn’t far away. I was certain that he had gone totally insane . . .
The Horror . . . The Horror . . .

I’m not sure what dear old Beatrix Potter would have made of all this. By all accounts Rene Zelwegger’s turn in the recent bunny-centric storyteller biopic is a corker. As a life-long fan of the Tales of Benjamin and all those narrow scrapes with Mr McGregor I’ll have to catch this movie soon.

I relieved Tess of her ill-gotten gain, flicking the decapitated noggin into bushes.

Ideally Alice would have spun The Doors’ The End as USAAF strafed Blackcap with napalm. In the end I settled on a track du jour that’s both a great tune and a terrible gag. It’s the Eagles number about fast and loose lovers in a Scottish nuclear shipyard: Life In The Fas' Lane.

Sorry