Scarred For Life

The other evening my staff discovered that Boris is losing a lot of hair. His little pink body is showing through his normally thick fur. My staff said he looks like the top of Prince Charles' head after he spent too long in the sun without a hat at one of his mum's garden parties. Anyway, he had to pay a visit to the vet and while she was examining his tummy fur he obligingly supplied a urine sample which the vet just avoided getting a faceful of with remarkably quick reflexes. Boris then equally as obligingly provided a sample of bush chocolate and was most put out when the vet displayed little interest in collecting either of them.

 "Mites!" She declared having scraped half of Boris' skin off with a scalpel and examined it minutely under a microscope. My staff tell that a microscope is a kind of instrument normally used for finding politicians' honesty glands and white supremacists brains. The vet then stabbed poor old Boris with a needle that he reckons must have been meant for a rhino. Still, he survived and he and my staff returned home clutching a tube of evil smelling ointment that he has to have smeared on his back once a week for three weeks, and get this! Baci and I have to have it too!  I told my staff in no uncertain terms that I DO NOT HAVE MITES. "Mites" I explained, "are only attracted to inferior rodents with German accents and bratwurst breath. "It would" I continued, "be a gross injustice - nay, a monumental insult to assume that I, of all guinea pigs - cavy royalty, a descendant of my great ancestor King Cavy William the third of Peru, would have something as common as mites." However, as usual all the ignoramuses heard was "Wheek wheek rumble wheek putt putt wheek." So I got smeared with the bloody stuff anyway. I showed my disapproval by refusing to eat my dinner - for thirty seconds. That'll show 'em.

You all look reasonably intelligent and on the ball for humans, so you may remember that my male staff had to shave his knees a couple of weeks ago because the fizzy-oh-terrorist wanted him to look extra stupid when walking around the town with his shorts on. It worked superbly by the way. Everyone sniggers and points at my male staff as he passes by in the street. Come to think of it they did that before he shaved his knees. In any case, the shaving of the knees seemed to evoke some childhood memories for him due to the scars that the hair removal revealed, proving that his clumsiness and ineptitude is not a recent affliction, but has in fact apparently been going on for many, many years. It is my understanding that he almost strangled himself with his own umbilical cord before he was born and then got so lost after he left his mum's womb that he was a month late and weighed about twenty five kilos. He was so late that the midwife didn't bother smacking his bum, but shaved his stubble instead.

Anyway, with his newly shaved shiny knees he gathered the household around him, my female staff, Paolo the budgie, Boris, Baci and myself to tell the story of each scar. Baci immediately curled up and went to sleep, but my male staff's droning voice kept the rest of us awake.
 "This scar here", he said, pointing to a long faded white line, "I got when I was two years old. I tripped over next door's cat in the garden and cut myself on a sharp piece of slate. There was blood everywhere, but even then I was quick thinking." My female staff rolled her eyes. I picked them up and rolled them back to her. Hah! Just kidding. My male staff continued. "Oh yes indeed. I just grabbed half a dozen bull ants and got them to bite me so that they wound closed. Then I just carried on playing after making sure that next door's cat was okay." I thought to myself, if he'd fallen on the cat there's no way it would be okay. "I never did have proper stitches. The bull ants did the trick and I just pulled them out a few days later." Boris was about to point out that they don't have bull ants in gardens in Northampton, England, but a sharp look from yours truly silenced him. Better to let my male staff have his Baby Bear Grills fantasy than have him ramble some half witted explanation of how bull ants came to be in his garden.

And so it went on, scar after scar. Dawn was breaking over the glittering Coral Sea and little Baci was stirring and starting to look for his breakfast as my male staff finally got to the last scar - a relatively small one. "I was thirteen when I got this one." He said. Unlucky for us, I thought. "Some silly bugger slammed a glass door in my face and I put my hand out to stop it and my arm went straight through it and ripped half my arm off." I've told you a billion times not to exaggerate, I thought, but once again kept my piggy lips buttoned. "The blood was running down my arms and dripping all over the floor, but I was a tough kid, not as tough as I am now obviously, but pretty tough." I thought of how he cried when Badger passed away and thought to myself, oh yes, you are one hellova tough nut.
"I just found a few friends," he went on, "and we played football for three hours. By the time we'd finished, the pitch was more red than green and I'd lost so much blood that I was about the same shade of white as the goalposts. Then I went home for dinner, but Mum and Dad were so horrified by the gaping hole in my arm that they rushed me to hospital and because there were no bull ants around I had to have fifteen stitches.
 "That doesn't explain the scar on your knee." Said my female staff and received a savage glare from the rest of us. Paolo almost fell of his perch. We had all hoped that that was the end of the story and that we would finally get some breakfast.
 "I was coming to that." Said my male staff. I was afraid you might be, I thought.
 "After dinner I went to my room to play some records with my arm in the sling that the nurse told me I had to wear for a week. I was sitting on my bed listening to Black Sabbath and the steady beat of the neighbours banging on the wall and screaming "TURN THAT BLOODY RACKET OFF!" when I noticed my favourite penknife on my bedside table. I picket it up and started fiddling with it, trying to open it with one hand because my right hand was out of action in the sling. I almost had it open when it snapped shut and sliced into my finger. There was blood flying everywhere again and I instinctively flicked my finger away which opened the knife fully so that it sliced even more deeply into my finger. That flick then caused the knife to loop gracefully into the air. I was sucking on my half severed finger as the knife fell, seemingly in slow motion and I watched in horrified fascination as it stuck into my leg just above my knee. Somehow I staggered from my bedroom, my right arm in a sling, my left hand dripping blood all over the carpet and a penknife sticking out of my leg with more blood running down my shin.
Muuu-uuum! I shouted. I think I might have cut myself again."
 "Right." I said. "Can we have our breakfast now please?"

Boris' Bit

It is not beink fair zat Herr Billy is blamink me for havink to be schmeared mit der schtinky stuff. His female staff tells me zat he himself had der mites ven he vas ein kleines baby. Zo he can be vheeking all he likes, I still sink zat it vas him zat gave me der verdammt  mites.

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Scheiße Für Brains

All five males creatures in this household are in a very good mood this morning. That's myself, Boris, Baci, Paolo and .........errrm.........and........no don't tell me. it'll come to me in a second. Who am I missing? Ahhhhh yes, the big lump of lard who feeds me............my male staff. That makes five doesn't it? Why are we all so happy? You ask. It's because Anna Ivanovic beat Serena Williams at the Australian Tennis Open. This means we can all ogle Anna for at least one more match. For a human she's pretty stunning don't you think? I reckon she'd even make a pretty good guinea pig sow. She only has two teats, the same as lady guinea pigs for a start, though she could use a bit more hair on her butt and perhaps run around on all fours a bit more often. Still, like I said, not bad for a human and these shortcomings can be overlooked. She's pretty good at wafting the old tennis bat (or whatever it's called) too.

That other chicky babe - the blond Russian one - what's her name? Maria Shovemova? She scares the living bush chocolate out of us guinea pigs with her yelling every time she whacks the ball with her tennis bat. Poor young Baci is a nervous wreck and refuses to come out of his house when she's playing. Honestly, if hitting a tennis ball causes her that much pain surely she ought to give the game up and concentrate on something a little more feminine - like macrame or bingo. Actually bingo would suit her to a tee, there's no way the caller will miss her shout when she gets a line or a full house.

Yes indeed, the thwack of furry balls on a tennis bat is certainly the sound of summer in Australia. The smell of summer, at least at our house is the aroma of ripening mangoes, and mangoes are also the taste of summer for my staff. When they bought the house they inherited about twelve mango trees and when the season is good like this year the house if full of them. They try to give some away to workmates and friends but after a while these work mates and friends tend to avoid my staff because they know they'll have a boxful of ripe mangoes thrust into their arms.
 "Oh God! Here they come again with their bloody mangoes. Quick, get behind the sofa and pretend we're not in." Luckily the flying fox bats, birds and possums eat about half of them before my staff have the chance to pick them, otherwise the mango glut would be twice as bad. As it is they have mangoes for almost every meal. Mango on cereal at breakfast, mango salad, mango curry, mango and chips, mango sandwiches (with or without Vegemite), mango stuffed with mango. One year my female staff made enough mango chutney to feed a small developing nation for a decade. None of  us guinea pigs like the stuff. We just turn our furry little noses up at it and say "Take that crap away and bring us some basil." Of course what my staff hear is "Wheek wheek rumble putt putt wheek", but I think they are finally getting our drift.

And so onto the main topic of this week's post which is, as it often is - a complaint about the stupidity of humans. Our fellow Australians - at least the human ones are always going on about how Australia is the best country in the World. That may well be true, my staff certainly seem to be happy enough living here. So why are we (and by "we" I mean "you") trying to destroy the very thing that makes Australia such a wonderful place? Our wonderful environment and unique wildlife. Everywhere you look bush is being cleared for acres and acres of cheap boxy housing, our cities spread like a wet blob of cow's bush chocolate dropped from the roof of a skyscraper. Perth for example is about a hundred kilometres north to south. Just because we have the space doesn't mean we have to fill it all with concrete. Australia doesn't do "green belts". We are doing our best to kill off the Great Barrier Reef with dredging spoil and fertiliser runoff. The once mighty Murray River has been reduced to such a trickle in places that it makes the average hamster pee look like a tsunami. Where has the water gone? Irrigation that's where. The last government bought back irrigation licenses to try to save the river and it was working, but now the new dumb, greedy government is selling licenses back to irrigators again, just a few for now, but you can bet your bunch of basil that it is the thin end of the wedge and before long the Murray will be back to square one.

Koalas, wombats, bilbys, numbats, platypus and many others are threatened by development and land clearing by farmers and mining companies. Australia has the highest rate of mammal extinction on the planet and yet we like to portray ourselves as being clean and green. We treat our wildlife as an inconvenience to be moved on or preferably destroyed. Our flying foxes roost in parkland in towns and cities because their natural habitat has been cleared. Then of course the nearby human residents want the local council to move them on or cull them because of the noise and smell. Naturally the council obliges because they want to be re-elected. Where do the bats go? To another town of course, where they colonise another park because there's no natural habitat left for them, and so it goes on.

We whinge that nations like China and India are causing climate change with their high carbon emissions, yet we Aussies are the highest polluters per capita on earth, and anyway, who do you think is selling all that filthy coal to the Indians and the Chinese anyway. Yep, good old clean, green Australia.

Boris' Bit 

Ich haf asked Herr Billy's staff to be writink ein letter to zat  dumkopf of ein Prime Minister of ours tellink him to be makink stronger protection laws für der umvelt. Sadly Herr Billy's staff say zat it vould be ein total vaste of time because anyvun who sinks zat climate change is ein myth is obviously too much of ein scheiße für brains to verstehen zat vot Australia is doink to der umvelt is wrong.

Bare Buttocks & Bouncy Boobs (I bet that gets me a few extra readers.)

My male staff has given himself a Brazilian, and by that I don't mean that he has purchased one of those coffee coloured chicky babes you see at the Rio Carnival. You know, the ones with bare buttocks and bouncy boobs. He'd like to of course, but my female staff would never allow it. Or if she did it would be on the strict condition that he pays a visit to the vet first to have to dangly bits removed, pickled and then displayed in an ornate glass jar on the sideboard. No, actually it wasn't even a proper Brazilian, he just shaved his knees, and let me tell you it was not a simple process. Some of his knee hairs were too long and resisted the frantic wielding of an ordinary razor when they were wet and soapy, so he gave up with that and waited until his knees had dried off. He then discovered that he had been trying to shave his knees with the razor's cover still on so he had to screw up the letter of complaint he was writing to Gillette moaning about how useless and blunt their razors are.

My female staff suggested that she had a go at his knees with the Whipper-Snipper. I think it's called a "Strimmer" in Britain and a "Weed-Whacker in the USA. Weed Wackner sounds like a euphemism for someone addicted to marijuana to me.
  "Oh, you can't believe anything he says, he's a bit of a weed whacker, and I know for a fact that he's been whacking quite a bit of weed lately." In any case, my male staff was none too enamoured with the idea of having his knees whipper snipped and so persevered with a dry razor, this time without the cover and finally met with some success. His knees are now as smooth as a babies bum, and just as dimpled.

I expect you are asking yourself why on earth my male staff would elect to shave his knees. The answer is quite simple. He was told to by a tall, thin, bald man. I met this man in a small room tucked away under a doctors surgery. I went to this place with my male staff. We were told to sit and wait by a lady behind a desk who glared at me disapprovingly, but chose not to say anything because the sign on the door only said "NO DOGS EXCEPT ASSISTANCE DOGS". There was no mention of rodents and she could see that my male staff was the pedantic type who was sure to argue that very point. So while my male staff sat and lethargically leafed through a 1998 deep sea fish magazine (He hates fishing, but since it was a choice between that and a children's booked called "Noddy Does Dallas" or some such thing, the fishing mag got the nod. At least he could look at the adverts for gleaming boats with scantily clad models draped across them.) I mooched about on the floor and found a comfortable corner in which to leave a mound of bush chocolate - my generosity knows no limits.

After what seemed like an eternity we were invited to enter a small cubicle partitioned from the rest of the room by a curtain. From my position, clutched to my male staff's chest I could see a very hard looking bed in the middle of the room with a bum shaped hole at one end.  That's handy I thought. Why don't my staff get themselves one of these. It would save them the trouble of getting up in the night to go to the toilet. I was a little alarmed to notice that there was no receptacle under the hole, but the floor beneath it seemed clean enough and there was no smell. Then I saw the afore mentioned tall, thin bald dude. He thrust forward a hand and for a moment I thought he was going to hit my male staff. "That's odd." I thought to myself. "Most people at least wait until they are introduced before they hit my male staff." But he just said "I'm Alec, your fizzy-oh-terrorist." My male staff grabbed the man's hand before it could hit him and gave it a good shake. "That'll teach him" I thought. "He won't mess with my male staff again."

  "Now," said Alec. "What shall we do with that?"
  "With what?" I thought, and then saw that he was pointing his bony finger at yours truly.
  "If it's okay with you I'll put him in your wash basin." Said my male staff. "He can't do any harm in there and the sides are too steep and slippery for him to get out." Then before I could say "You're not going to put me in there you pair of bastards." they'd put me in there. All I could do was make the most of a bad situation. By standing on my hind legs I could at least peer over the rim to see what they were up to. First the fizzy-oh-terrorist got my male staff to lay belly down on the bed so that his face disappeared into the bum shaped hole. "My God!" I thought. "Whatever he's going to do to my male staff is going to make him puke." Then he started bending my male staff's legs this way and that to the accompaniment of various loud clicks and cracks. Then when he was convinced that my male staff was not going to throw up after all the fizzy-oh-terrorist told him to roll over onto his back. There was then more leg twisting and some poking of the knees, and not a little grimacing by my male staff.
  "Inflamed tendons." Proclaimed the fizzy-oh-terrorist. "I have to strap your knees to take the pressure off them. You'll have to shave them first though because the tape won't stick very well to the hairs. Come back tomorrow when you've shaved your knees and I'll strap you up." And that was it. Five minutes later we were back in the Getz driving home, and all the while I'm thinking what a naive being my male staff is. He's going to shave his legs just because some tall, thin, bald guy tells him to. How does he know it's not just a big joke. The tall, thin, bald guy might do this kind of thing all the time so that the people in town get a good laugh when they see his victims in the street.
  "Ha ha ha!" People will say as they nudge each other. "Look, that silly old bugger over there has shaved his legs, he must have been to see Alec."

Boris' Bit

Ha ha ha! Herr Billy's male staff is not beink very bright. Fancy fallink for zat alt vun.
 "You must go avay und be shavink your legs mein freund. Und zen you must be comink back here ven you haf done it."
Ich vunder how many dumkopfs der fizzy-oh-terrorist has caught mit zat vun.

Life And Soul

What nonsense! Humans say that they are the only species (with the possible exception of elephants) who are aware of their own mortality. What arrogance. How dare they? The very fact that I - a guinea pig, am writing this is conclusive proof that other creatures are only too aware that they are going to kark it eventually. I agree that lemmings might not necessarily share this insight, or they wouldn't go leaping off cliffs, but then again who's to say that they don't have good reason to want to end it all. They do, after all, live in the Arctic region of Norway where in winter it is dark for twenty five hours a day and their only entrainment is setting fire to people's igloos while they're inside watching reruns of "Friends" or going to the local herring flinging championships, which as I understand it is Norway's national sport.

Many humans, particularly the God bothering types are also apt to insist that humans are the only species to possess a soul. How do they know this? Come to that, do they even know what a soul is? What is a soul? Can you describe it for me? No of course you can't. You'd have to believe in reincarnation would you not? You'd have to believe that once a person kicks the bucket his or her soul goes to a kind of spiritual waiting room with a water cooler and maybe a snack vending machine until another physical body is ready for you. Then your name is called - "Mrs Smith please." Actually that's a bad example because about half the waiting room would stand up and they'd be a big fight for the new physical body, especially if it's one just born into a rich family. So maybe they give you a number when you arrive and call that out. "Number seven trillion, fourteen million, six hundred and eight thousand, two hundred and fifty one please." Jeez wouldn't you hate it if you fell asleep, missed your number and had to go to the back of the queue again?

Your soul is then inserted into your new physical body, and this is where it gets complicated. You may consider yourself to have a good soul. You may have lived an exemplary life, helping others and donating to charity. But, then you are given the physical body of a child born into a desperately poor family of petty criminals in say the city of Jakarta for example. Does your "good" soul enable you to resist temptation or do environmental factors take over. Your parents and older siblings press you to go out pickpocketing as soon as you are able to walk so that the family can eat. Then, as you get older you inevitably become involved with a gang of kids who steal food from market stalls, older still and you are offered a class A drug by a friend. You accept and form a habit. That's it then, you thieve, murder and rape - whatever it takes to obtain your next hit of whatever evil substance you've become addicted too. Or you might turn to prostitution, male or female, it doesn't matter. You steal from your clients. You don't tell them you have AIDS. They don't tell you that they have it, not that you care anyway, as long as you can afford the next hit.

A grim and complicated scenario isn't it, but all I'm trying to point out is that we animals are as likely to have a soul, good or bad, as any human. After all humans are just animals too and as such are very much at the mercy of instinct, environmental factors and the drive to survive. A friendly dog that gets kicked everyday will eventually bite someone.

Gee! That was all very deep for a guinea pig wasn't it? I guess now and again we are all forced to confront the disturbing reality of our own mortality. I recently lost a very good human Twitter friend called Janey. I count her as a friend because even though I never met her personally she was always the first to send me a Christmas card, offer a kind word or compliment me on my fur and overall level of cuteness. She loved animals (She left behind a beautiful black cat called Jessie, who I understand is being well looked after.) and supported both human and animal charities. When my pal Badger sadly passed away in September this year Jane was the first to offer consoling words and I will sorely miss her cheerful tweets. RIP Jane Forster - both myself and my male staff have shed a quiet tear at your passing. If there is such a thing as a soul, yours will be up there with the most beautiful of them all.

Boris' Bit.

Ve are beink alle sehr sad for Herr Billy und his male staff. Ich sink zey sought ein groß deal of zeir freund Janey. Poor Herr Billy. In diesen tagen his bedding is gettink vetter from his tears zan from his vee vee.