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.