The Guinea Pig Saver

What a week! I've been in hospital again. I had a throat ulcer and was having trouble swallowing my food. So once again I was loading into the Hyundai Getz (Ignoring my male staff's cruel and unnecessary comments that he's thinking of buying a forklift for such operations.") and driven by my female staff to the guinea pig specialist vet on the north side of Brisbane. Normally I rather enjoy riding with my female staff because she remembers that the Getz is a manual vehicle and changes gear now and again, rather than driving everywhere in first gear like my male staff, who thinks it's an automatic.  However, you may recall that my female staff was recently diagnosed with cataracts, and now she says it's like looking out through a fog. So armed with this knowledge I was more than a little nervous and not the least bit surprised when we ended up on the south side of Brisbane before my female staff realised she'd missed the turning. She explained to me that she was having trouble reading the street names and I explained to her that I'd feel safer if she let me out and let me walk the rest of the way. We exchanged words at that point, many of them beginning with the letter F, but since I was locked inside a carrying box there wasn't much I could do but sit tight and hope we didn't hit anything big and heavy.

Two hours and three random breath tests later we arrived the the hospital and I was left there to be tortured once again. I was jabbed with needles, drugged, had my mouth and bottom passage peered into with torch and suffered numerous other indignities for two whole until finally on Friday my male staff turned up as if nothing had happened. By that time the vet had placed me in my carrying box ready to go. I glared with overt venom at my male staff, who said "Hello Billy, I've come to take you home."
  "You can get stuffed you bastard!" I said. "Leaving me here for these monsters to have their wicked way with me." I always forget that he can't understand Piglish though, so all he heard was "wheeeek! wheeeek! wheeeek!"
  "Aww." Said my male staff. "He's pleased to see me , bless him."

Back in the Hyundai Getz I was placed on the front seat and resigned myself to two noisy hours driving at one hundred and ten kilometres an hour in first gear. The first thing I noticed though was that there was a mini television stuck to the inside of the windscreen. It's a GPS he explained. Apparently he bought this thing thinking that GPS stood for Guinea Pig Saver. His line of thought was that the ninety nine dollar investment in the guinea pig saver would very quickly save money in vet bills.

Anyway, an added bonus with the guinea pig saver is that it helps you find your way to places, which is really helpful if. like my male staff, you could compete in the Special Olympic in the Totally Bloody Useless Sense of Direction category. The GPS thingy was even clever enough to match my female staff driving advice. Actually it wasn't so much advice as demands, delivered in a strident Margaret Thatcher type voice.
  "Turn right in two hundred metres, then turn right again, then again and again." My male staff had been driving around in right handed circles for half an hour before he realised that the voice was indeed that of Margaret Thatcher and that there was more chance of him winning the Australian Formula One Grand Prix in his Hyundai Getz that he did of getting Maggie to order a left turn. U turns were right out too. Finally he managed to switch the damned thing off and we found our own way home - in first gear all the way naturally.

BADGER'S FOOT NOTE
I must admit that I was one of the very few beings on earth who welcomed the GFC. I thought it stood for Guinea pig Foot Club. For a while I thought I would have the opportunity to show off my feet to like minded cavies. How was I to know it was actually a man made disaster brought on by a bunch of greedy bankers and stupid politicians.

The Taliban Diet

The other day my male staff took me into the shopping centre near his reverse people smuggling office (My male staff claims it's a travel agency.) This in itself was rather unusual, especially when it gets close to Christmas. All that tinsel, baubles and piped Christmas music does something to his primitive human brain and makes him shuffle miserably about muttering "Bah Humbug!" and complaining about an "obnoxious little brat" called Tiny Tim. On this occasion our mission into enemy territory was to find the electronic scales that spit out a slip of paper with your weight and height on.  Eventually we located it outside the public toilets, so my male staff and I went into the gents to relieve ourselves of a little weight before we stepped on to the scales for our traditional pre-Christmas weigh-in.

Feeling several kilos lighter my male staff stepped onto the scales with yours truly perched on his shoulder. Reluctantly, and with a sad sigh his shoved his dollar coin into the slot. Presently his height was displayed on a small screen in front of us and a curl of paper appeared from the machine accompanied by a soft whirr. We stepped down from the scales and my male staff read the writing on the piece of paper while I peered over his shoulder.

ONE AT A TIME PLEASE, YOU PAIR OF FAT BASTARDS.

"You'll have to lose some weight Bill." He said, poking me in the tummy with a chubby finger. I just bit him, as anyone would have in the circumstances. My female staff certainly would have. In fact she has done on several occasions. So once my male staff had finished yelping and wiping his bloodied finger on the clothes of small children we wandered back to my male staff's office through the throngs of porky pre-christmas shoppers feeling a little depressed. That is, we were feeling a little depressed, not the porky shoppers. They all looked very happy indeed, as one would if one had just consumed enough junk food to feed a Somali family for a month. No, we were depressed because we had been told that we were obese and the traditional Christmas over indulgence hadn't even started.

Back at the office, while I busied myself nibbling the office girls feet under their desks my male staff phoned my female staff to tell her the result of the weigh-in. I couldn't help overhearing that most of the one hundred and five kilos that registered on the scales were being attributed by my male staff to me. I heard him telling my female staff that I am dangerously obese and should be placed on a strict diet immediately. I was so shocked by this that I bit a little harder than intended into the lady's toe, causing her to squeal satisfyingly and hit the wrong key on her computer, thus consigning her client to a three week holiday in Pyong Yang rather than Phuket. Boy is he in for a surprise!

Anyway, when we got home it was immediately apparent that my female staff didn't believe that my tummy was responsible for most of the one hundred and five kilograms. She suggested that my male staff tried something called "The Taliban Diet", which apparently promises the almost instant loss of seven kilograms of ugly fat.  My male staff had never heard of this so he googled it. It seems the Taliban Diet involves taking a trip to the remote tribal areas of Pakistan and introducing yourself to the brave, brave "men" who shot female education advocate Malala Yousafzai - a fifteen year old school girl. These heroes pulled the little girl from her school bus and put a bullet in her head. It takes a lot of guts to shoot a schoolgirl.  Luckily she survived thanks to the care of a London hospital and hopefully she has a sparkling future ahead of her in what ever career path she chooses.

So anyway, once the prospective weight loser has introduced himself to these charmers the next step is to let them know that he thinks that female education is a wonderful thing and should be encouraged. He is then dragged off to the local village square, where the population has been forced to gather on pain of being made to watch "The Bold & The Beautiful" repeats on the village telly. Then in a special execution area behind the boys only bouncy castle adjacent to the men only ladies public toilets he is subjected to a severe whipping with a wet beard, culminating in being beheaded with a rusty butter knife. Hence the instant loss of seven kilograms of ugly fat. Further weight loss is then facilitated by decomposition, though the rate can vary depending on the temperature.
It is so comforting to know that as we approach Christmas, a time of peace and goodwill to all mankind, my female staff cares about my male staff so much that she is willing to provide him with such helpful dietary advice and is so touchingly concerned about his welfare.

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE
Some of the porky shoppers in the shopping centre even have fat feet. How could they let themselves go to such an extent?









The Blind Leading The Blind

The intelligence of Labrador dogs is greatly overrated. It's really not that difficult to lead a blind human around. Badger and I had a go at it and it wasn't that hard. As my regular readers will know, my female staff has cataracts and is having trouble seeing how ugly my male staff is. This is a serious problem because she is starting to hear comments from passers-by when they are out together.
 Things like "Cor! Talk about beauty and the beast!" and "Mummy. Why is that nice lady holding hands with a gargoyle?" It's amazing how your other senses like hearing compensate for the loss or diminution of another.

The other day we were all bundled into the Hyundai Getz, Badger and I on the back seat and my staff up front. My staff like to sit in the front of the car as it makes driving the thing easier. We were told we were going to see an eye specialist. Well, my male staff Badger and I were going to see him. My female staff probably wouldn't due to her cataracts. It was about a forty minute drive and Badger and I entertained ourselves by flinging bush chocolate at each other and plaintively crying "Are we there yet?" which I imagine my staff heard as high pitch wheeking because they ignored us.

If this face was wheeking at you from the back seat of your car would you ignore it?

An hour later we arrived at the eye clinic, following numerous diversions, swearing and complaints from my male staff to my female staff that shouts of "Turn Here" are not much good unless she also includes the direction in which he should turn. Serves him right for asking a blind person to navigate I reckon. I may have mentioned this before, but my male staff likes to save wear and tear on the Getz's brakes by gently rolling to a halt against the rear of another car. As well as saving money on brake linings it enables him to meet all sorts of interesting people......and get involved in fisticuffs with them. This time he managed to find quite a new BMW to come to rest against. Evidently the driver was in the car and about to drive off when we arrived and was unreasonably cross when the Getz gentle touched the back of the BMW, leaving the minutest of scratches. The driver strode purposefully towards my male staff, but Badger, my female staff and I didn't have time to watch the altercation because my female staff was late for her appointment. She hitched us up to our harnesses and leads, and we led her into the clinic. There were a few steps, which were tricky and required a bit of scrambling. Eventually we succeeded by having Badger stand on my back at each step and then hauling me up after him. It took about twenty minutes, but my female staff was very patient with us. Finally we made it to the lift and after five or ten minutes of random finger prodding of the wall my female staff managed to find the button to summon it.

Badger's not keen on lifts. You may remember that the last time he was in one he threw up all over an Arab.  The following link will reacquaint you with that affair.
 http://pemery.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/just-desserts.html
The clinic was only on the first floor on this occasion but Badger had already thrown up before the lift doors had had time to close behind us. In a moment or two the lift stopped and we all stepped over the pool of cavy puke into the clinic waiting room. As we were three minutes late for my female staff's appointment we were told by the Margaret Thatcher-esque receptionist (Who had evidently graduated with flying colours from the John McEnroe School of Good Manners) that we would now have to wait for the eye specialist, Doctor Seymour Wrighting to finish his putting practice before he would see us, so we all settled down to chew a few twenty year old National Geographic magazines.

Half an hour later we were still chewing magazines when my male staff arrived looking somewhat dishevelled and had a pronounced limp. Apparently the driver of the BMW had been quite feisty for an octogenarian lady and my male staff had only managed to subdue her by snatching her dentures as she tried to bite him and tossing them into the nearby canal and by snapping her walking stick over his knee. My female staff asked if that was the reason for his limp. It wasn't. Apparently the old lady had kicked him in the testostricles and then he'd slipped on a pool of vomit in the lift. Hence he wasn't in the best of moods.

At long last the doctor came out and invited us all into the office. Standing up and spitting out bits of chewed up magazines we all followed Dr Wrighting and sat down and my female staff was given an eye test.
 "Can you read the top line of letters on the chart on the wall?" Asked the doctor.
 "I can't even see the bloody wall." Replied my female staff.
 "Well you obviously have sight issues." He said as he resumed his putting practice. "Come back in January and will whip out those cataracts. That'll be three hundred and sixty dollars."

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE
Horror of horrors! I trod in my own puke at I was leading my female staff from the lift. I asked the Margaret Thatcher-esque receptionist if she knew of a good foot specialist who could clean them up for me before the trip home. She just looked down her nose at me, understandably, because it's very difficult to look up your own nose.

Asylum Seekers

This week I am absolutely livid. Firstly because it's been hot and I've had to sit on my male staff's lap in the evenings while he's wearing only his underpants, and believe me, that is something that nobody should have to endure. I even read the Geneva convention, but there was no mention of it in that particular document. All I can say is that there bloody well should be. So, I apologise now for my bad mood, but who wouldn't be a little cranky if they keep getting dragged away from their dinner and forced to sit on an almost naked middle aged man's lap?

The other thing that has made my blood boil this week are the things that Australian politicians will do and say if they think it'll win them a couple of extra votes. It was while I was suffering the unpleasantness of my male staff's scantily clad lap that I witnessed an ugly scene on television. It was Australia's two main political parties in a race to the bottom of the sewer. Both the Labor Party government and Liberal/National party coalition are trying to outdo each other in trying to deter potential asylum seekers and to stigmatise asylum seekers who have already arrived on these shores.

What is particularly galling is that Australia was made the great nation that it is today by refugees, mostly white European ones - forced British convicts, people from Ireland seeking a better life, Italians and Greeks after the Second World War and quite a few Vietnamese who arrived by boats in the nineteen seventies and eighties. All hard working men and women willing to make a go of things and not asking anything from their new country but the opportunity for a new start and a safer life. How sad it is then that many Australians are so rabidly against accepting more refugees. They have been conned by politicians into believing that Australia is being swamped with "illegal" boat arrivals as the Liberal opposition leader and utter buffoon Tony Abbott incorrectly calls asylum seekers. He must know that it is not illegal to arrive in Australia by boat without papers and seek asylum, so his only reason for calling these people "illegal arrivals" must be political expediency.

Australia is far from being swamped with refugees. We currently stand 46th on the league table of nations who accept refugees. We have a little over twenty thousand refugees. That is just .2% of the global total, so lets get a little perspective happening here for once. Recently there have been several tragedies at sea involving boatloads of asylum seekers. Their leaky, unseaworthy vessels have sunk with severe loss of life. Many of them paid their life savings to people smugglers for a place on one of these Australia bound rust buckets. So, with much feigned wailing, gnashing of teeth and crocodile tears the Australian government decided to try to stem this loss of life by reintroducing offshore processing in the naive and unrealistic belief that it would stop asylum seekers paying people smugglers for danger fraught sea journeys to Australia because their asylum claims would be processed in hot, humid hell holes like Nauru and Manaus Island and so would not necessarily be granted refugee status in Australia.

It is already perfectly obvious even to a guinea pig that this so called deterrence does not work and since it's introduction boat arrivals have increased. This has to mean that the Australian government is either hopelessly out of touch with the reality of the terrifying, desperate situations that exist in nations like Sri Lanka, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan or they are pandering to the redneck minority in Australia, panicked into doing so by rabid right wingers in the Liberal party. Either way, it's not a good look. Tony Abbott was one of the worst teeth gnashers at the boat tragedies. It's a wonder that he has any teeth left to gnash. He virtually accused the Labor government of murdering the poor sods who drown trying to reach Australia. Now he's say that he'll cut Australia's refugee intake from other countries, meaning that even more people will be tempted to pay people smugglers to get them to Australia by boat because they'll have even less chance to get here by other means.

It's time Aussie humans put themselves in the shoes of someone fleeing war and persecution. Here's a scenario for you to ponder.

It is the year 2032 and climate change is really starting to kick in. Years of drought in southern Australia have had a huge impact on the food crops and cattle and sheep have been dying in their thousands, while in the north rain has been far heavier than it used to be, causing widespread flooding year after year. Cyclones have been more frequent and more severe causing more damage to crops and infrastructure. Governments can no longer afford to repair roads or maintain a reliable power grid. Unemployment has risen to 39% and crime is rampant as desperate people strive to keep their families fed. To deal with the crime wave several state governments have introduced curfews to keep people off the streets after dark. City populations are swollen by people pouring into them from the worst hit regional areas, people desperate for work, but there are too few jobs to go around and many of the great parks in cities around the nation have become squalid squatter camps of toiletless ramshackle corrugated iron dwellings. The Austalian government has appealed for aid but few nations can afford to help and in any case there is little sympathy for a nation who were one of the worst per capita offenders in the cause of climate change. In fact in November 2013 the new Prime Minister Tony Abbott reiterated his opinion that the idea of  climate change was "A load of crap."

Desperate families flock to northern coastal towns. town like Mackay, Gladstone, Townsville, Cairns, Broome and Darwin where unscrupulous people smugglers are selling places on rusty, unseaworthy boats on voyages to India and Indonesia who have been spared the worst ravages of climate change. Their economies have been less affected than most by the global climate induced recession and rumour has it that there are jobs to be had there and a better, safer life. Thousands of Australians sell their now almost worthless homes in order to purchase a place on a boat. Most prefer the more dangerous and longer passage to India because along with China they have become the leading world economy.  However, the Indian government is under pressure from the populace not to accept refugees from such an alien culture as Australia and boatloads of Aussies are towed out of Indian territorial waters by the Indian navy. Many die as boats sink in storms or simply perish from thirst and hunger as they boats run out of provisions and don't have enough fuel to make landfall elsewhere.  This is ironic, because it is exactly the same policy advocated by Tony Abbott when he became Prime Minister of Australia.

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE.
There's no way I'd ever get on one of those leaky boats. I might get my feet wet.

 

Pinking Shears

Guinea pig dreams are usually quite staid affairs. Mine mostly feature myself in a large meadow surrounded by lady cavies and a hell of a lot of fresh, juicy grass. I rarely have nightmares, but when I do it's a recurring one where I'm back in the old country - Peru, being eternally chased up and down an Andean mountain by an Inca dude wielding a large stick and a wok. On such occasions I always wake before the Inca dude catches me thank goodness, but I find I've kicked most of my bedding onto the floor of the living room and have to spend the remainder of the night trying to get some sleep on bare newspaper, which is often damp and covered in bush chocolate - well, it is a scary dream after all.

Humans on the other hand have the weirdest dreams. For example the other night my female staff dreamed that my male staff was having a steamy affair with a sexy (but visually impaired) red head. She was very upset when she woke up and so was my male staff when he awoke to find my female staff poised over his dangly bits with a pair of pinking shears. My female staff remained cross with my male staff for a week, despite his protestations that "It was your bloody dream!" Anyway, he hid the pinking shears in the garden and things settled down after a while.

My female staff's weapon of choice.

My male staff's latest dream was even more disturbing than that. The other morning he declared to us all - my female staff, Paolo the budgie, Badger and I that he dreamed he had purchased an ex-navy aircraft carrier and had it fitted out as a luxury cruise ship. He'd bought a few tins of spray paint, painted the whole thing pink and promoted it as a "Gay and Lesbian Friendly Cruise Experience." He hired The Village People for the nightly entertainment and bought an old Chinook helicopter, which he also painted pink to transfer the passengers from shore to ship so that he wouldn't have to pay exorbitant berthing fees. He was so impressed with this dreamed-up business model that when he woke up he immediately started making enquiries about unwanted aircraft carriers and has already started accumulating cans of pink spray paint which he purchases from the local hardware shop at the rate of one a week. He reckons about ten might be enough. Of course he's also on the lookout for a used aircraft carrier, so if your hear of one please let me know. What's the USS Nimitz doing these days? If the United States Navy has finished with it my males staff would like to buy it. He says he can't pay for it immediately, but he can pay it off gradually as the profits start to roll in. He already has a name for it. "The Judy Garland".

Anyway, yesterday afternoon my staff took Badger and I to pick up my female staff's mum at our local airport. She's just spent a few days in a place called Sydney with my female staff's frantic sister. I haven't been to Sydney, but my male staff tells me that it is a remote village surrounded on one side by a cultural desert and on the other by an ocean of poker machines. We all had to go through security at the airport to get into the arrivals hall. Badger and I were put into separate plastic trays and trundled through a tunnel on a conveyor belt which apparently took photos of our innards to make sure we hadn't been stuffed with explosives by our staff. By the time we emerged from the other side of the tunnel our trays contained several items that looked like .22 ammunition. This rather puzzled the security dudes because the ammo hadn't been there when we entered the tunnel, until my male staff bit one of them in half (Not the security dudes - the ammunition. My male staff makes a point never to bite airport security dudes.) in order to prove to them that it was just bush chocolate.

So we all sat there at the airport. My staff bought us a salad to munch on while we waited and waited and waited and waited. A tall, strangely familiar looking man walked past us and made my female staff go all gooey and pink. My male staff raised his eyes towards the heavens and intimated to us that the man was someone called Pat Rafter who a few years ago was rather good at whacking little yellow balls over a net. He may have been good at it, but it obviously didn't pay well enough for him to afford to buy razor blades. Anyway as he went past our cafe table he gave us all an odd look as if he couldn't quite believe his eyes - a middle aged couple hand feeding two large rodents with bits of lettuce and cucumber while quietly slurping on cafe lattes. I think my female staff interpreted his interest as something other than the mild alarm it was and batted her eyelashes at him. Being the former tennis great that he is he batted them firmly back. Hah! Just kidding, actually he just increased his speed to put as much distance between himself and my staff as possible.

Meanwhile outside, the storm that had been threatening all day was finally delivering sheets of rain and cracking thunderbolts. At first there was an announcement that my female staff's mum's plane was in a holding pattern to the south of the airport while the captain waited for the weather to clear. The next announcement was that the captain was going to try to land the aircraft in fifteen minutes. Half an hour later a final announcement said that the captain had given up trying to land and was diverting to Brisbane instead. Brisbane airport is a ninety minute drive away and I think my male staff was about to suggest that my female staff's mum should walk home from there when he had a flashback to his dream and the pair of pinking shears poised over his family jewels.
 "Right then." He said with feigned cheerfulness. "Off to Brisbane we go." Then before he went to bed that night he sneaked into the garden to make sure that the pinking shears were still where he had hidden them. Yes indeed, a good marriage is built on trust.

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE
Actually, my feet have a kind of ethereal, dreamlike quality. They just seem too good to belong to this mundane, tired old world.

Fireworks Night

My female staff has just been diagnosed as having cataracts in both eyes. This has answered one or two things that have been bothering me for a while. For example, it explains why she keeps trying to feed bits of cucumber to my bottom passage. It also explains why she married my male staff - she's as blind as a very blind thing. I was going to say "bat", but bats actually see very well indeed. Clever things - bats, who after all are nothing more than guinea pigs with wings. Anyway, I digress. Now I'm worried that when my female staff has her cataracts removed in a couple of weeks she will take one look at the Quasimodo lookalike that she married, cry "Holy bush chocolate! Why didn't someone tell me?" and run of into the sunset leaving Badger and I to cope with a piteously grieving male staff who will let himself go (even more), turn to drink (even more) and start chasing younger women, not that he has any chance of catching them, but he's ever the optimist.

                                                    My male staff on one of his better days.

He'll lose his job because he'll smell and be drunk the whole time. Not that that's any different, but his incontinence problem will worsen due to the increased alcohol consumption, and eventually his boss will get sick of fielding complaints about my male staff bursting into tears all the time and blowing his substantial nose on client's ties. When this happens it will only be a matter of time before the money runs out, and that would bring about the biggest tragedy of all. He would no longer be able to afford to buy basil for Badger and I. I would therefore have to bite his finger when he tries to substitute some inferior herb, like dill. Then owing to his alcohol induced compromised immune system the bite would fester and become infected. Because he no longer has a job he won't be able to afford to see the doctor. Soon his whole hand turns black and drops off while holding a bottle of methylated spirits which was earmarked for his liver.  This makes him very cross as he now doesn't have enough money to buy another bottle of meths. Next thing you know there's an advert in the local shop.

    FOR SALE

    2 Guinea pigs

  $500 each

      One tweets and blogs    

                   The other eats and craps                

And all this because my female staff decided to go and have her eyes checked. "Should have gone to Specsavers" my bottom passage!

And so time moves inexorably forward and another Christmas draws nigh. At the shopping centre where my male staff works as a reverse people smuggler it is nigher than it should be. In fact it's been nigh since September when the decorations started going up. In October Christmas music began blaring through the PA system. Now in early November Santa has turned up and sits on a throne in an enclosure cordoned off from the rest of the shopping centre to protect him from the more obnoxious brats which abound at this time of year. It's rather surprising that he doesn't have armed minders looking out for him.

November the fifth has come and gone. "Fireworks Night" in my male staff's native Britain. His knowledge of history is a bit sketchy and can't really be trusted, but he says that Fireworks Night is a celebration of the day in 1605 when dog hater Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Battersea Stray Dogs' Home in London. He did this because he was driven insane by his neighbour's poodle who kept leaving smelly lumps of bush chocolate on his lawn for him to tread in.  According to my male staff he placed several casks of gunpowder in the cellar under the dogs home, lit the fuse and retired to the nearest pub. Unfortunately a passing King Charles spaniel peed on the fuse and the whole thing failed to explode. Guy Fawkes was later arrested by the RSPCA and was sentenced to one hundred hours of community service, which ironically involved cleaning the kennels at the Battersea Stray Dogs' Home.

Every November the fifth since that day British families have celebrated this event by setting off fireworks in their garden in an attempt to scare seven shades of bush chocolate from their neighbours dogs, often blowing their own fingers off or setting fire to the conservatory. As a small, fat child my male staff enjoyed this time of year. Not because it gave him the chance to scare animals but because he would spend the week leading up to the day gluing Airfix model World War Two planes together, his fat little pink tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. Then when he had assembled a sizeable squadron he'd glue a "penny banger" to the planes, light the fuses and one by one lob them out of his bedroom window to explode in mid air showering his mother's flowerbeds with melted plastic. Destroyed aircraft could be replaced at Christmas which of course followed six short weeks later.

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE
How the hell am I supposed to link this story to my feet? Honestly! The pressure to come up with something about feet at the end of each of Billy's blog posts is really getting to me.

                               

                                                             



The Road Fairy

I think something strange is going on in the United States of America, apart from people shooting each other and the fact that half of the eastern seaboard has been blown away and the New York Subway system has been transformed into the world's largest Wet & Wild theme park. Apparently there's a thing called a Presidential election happening. To be honest I thought a Presidential election was something reported by a Chinese TV news reader during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair. It seems not though. It appears that every four years Americans get to choose who their next lame-duck will be. This year the contest is between that nice Irishman Mr O'Barmer, who according to Donald Trump was born in Iran and is probably a member of the Taliban and some dude called Romney, who due to his vibrant personality was named after a baseball glove. It's all academic anyway because congress never passes anything useful anyway, no matter who is President.

Here in Australia we have Federal elections every three years which is way too often because the winner of the election immediately focuses on short term political gain and generally ignore long term programmes which would benefit the nation and future generations. In fairness, the current government has tried to do this in a limited and somewhat chaotic and incompetent way and as a consequence look about as likely to be re-elected as Badger is to play for the Brazil soccer team in the next World Cup. This goes to show that if you want to be elected in Australia you have to put the National Interest last on your list of priorities. It is therefore essential to express your disapproval of immigration, particularly the immigration of people who are not Caucasian. You should also expound your belief that taxation of any sort is a bad idea and hope to hell that the electorate are too stupid to link taxation to the provision of good public infrastructure like hospitals and roads. Honestly! Where do some humans think roads come from? The road fairy?

The Road Fairy whistles up yet another six lane highway.

Enough about politicians already anyway, it's irritating my thrush, which until now has been getting better, despite my staff force feeding aniseed tasting mush with a bloody great syringe which was supposed to stimulate my appitite, however the taste of it is enough to put you off food for the rest of your life. Vets really should be made to eat water they give to animals so that know how we feel. They should also have cold things poked up their bottom passage for the same reason. I firmly believe that all medical practitioners need to know what their victims/patients are going through. Anyway, all in all I am feeling a whole lot better and I'd really like to express my gratitude for all the lovely get well wishes I've had from everyone, especially my Twitter friends. It really is very moving to know that so many people care about the wellbeing of a small, furry rodent. So thanks everyone, and you know what the best thing is about being well again? My staff have stopped wetting my fur with their leaky eyes.

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE
There have been so many tears from Billy's staff while he was ill that I had to wear wellington boots to keep my feet dry.