Back To The Vet

I humbly plead for forgiveness for the late posting of this week's blog. Actually that's not quite what I mean. In reality I don't give a piece of rat's bush chocolate, so lets not pretend. Anyway, the reason for the tardy publication of my latest masterpiece is that I had to go to Brisbane with my male staff this morning. My right front foot has got rabies or something. Badger, our resident foot expert was worried that it might be contagious, so my staff made an appointment with the guinea pig specialist vet. I was loaded into my travelling cage with enough water, vegetables and pellets to keep a hippopotamus going for a week and off we went, following the strident instructions from the lady who lives in the GPS.

The worst thing about long drives with my male staff is not the erratic driving. After a while one gets used to bouncing across fields and median strips, and watching pedestrians dive for cover certainly helps to pass the time. (Old ladies carrying heavy bags of shopping are particularly entertaining.) No,  worse than that is his choice of music. There is only so much Jimmy Osmond, The Partridge Family and the Nolan Sisters that a guinea pig can take without going insane. But even that is not the worst thing. The very worst thing is his penchant for "singing" along. It sounds a lot like Badger when he got his testostricles caught in his cage door.

Now and again he feels like some heavy metal, so he slips in his Carpenters CD and does the whole head-banging Bohemian Rhapsody scene from the movie Wayne's World, but it's just not the same to  "Goodbye To Love" especially without the long hair. In fact he has a rather grey number two buzz cut. Consequently, other drivers witnessing this display tend to think the bloke in the little yellow Hyundai Getz is having an epileptic fit and swerve violently across the road to avoid him.

My female staff's choice of music is no better either. Car rides with her are plagued with Arabic belly dance music. Her favourite artist is someone called Hassan Norfulnoys which apparently translates to English as " He who screams like a thousand demented shaitans at the gates of hell." The last time my female staff drove me to the vet I told her that I would rather get out and walk the one hundred and twenty kilometres home from Brisbane rather than listen to that awful racket for another hour and a half, but I guess all she heard was "Wheek wheek wheek wheek mutter mutter rumble wheek." So I just had to sit there with a piece of carrot in each ear to block out the noise.

Anyway, it turns out that my foot doesn't have rabies, just a callous on one of my paw pads that's making me limp. When I say it's making me limp I don't mean that I have gone all flaccid. Don't worry girls I'm still the same old virile Billy, scourge of the girly pigs - well, scourge of Badger anyway, but let's not go there. I just want to make sure all my friends know that I am one hundred percent fine, well ninety nine point nine percent at least; I could always get a little better if my staff administered more basil.

Auntie Vanessa the vet was explaining to my male staff that they are going to try new microchip technology for small animals, birds and reptiles so that if they get lost and then found by someone their owner can be traced. It's a great idea, but Auntie Vanessa said that she was trialling the new microchip on one of the vet nurses. My male staff thought for a moment and said, "That's brilliant. You'll be able to tell if she's in the pub when she's called in sick, or having a sly cigarette out the back. I'm not sure the people at Civil Liberties would approve though, and what about her union?" Auntie Vanessa looked at him as though he was some sort of alien. I've often wondered about that myself.
 "No," she said, "I mean we're trying it on her bearded dragon." For a moment I thought she was talking about the security officer my male staff encountered last week at our local airport while meeting my female staff, by no, apparently a bearded dragon is some sort of lizard.

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE
This is just an absolute nightmare. I'm sharing a house with a guinea pig who has a foot problem. What if I catch foot rabies too? I think I'd better get Billy's staff to insure my feet.