George the house rabbit socks it to me
It’s one thing having rabbits in the garden eating stuff. It’s another having one in the house eating my shooting stockings. This is George, the daughter’s rabbit who has come to stay. George is a house bunny which means he pleases himself although, rather remarkably, he has been trained to use something from Pets-r-us which looks like a mauve urinal. I can’t say he is wholly accurate in his aim, but then boys very often aren’t. And while George normally confines his more annoying appetites to the plastic on mobile phone leads, printer cable and telephone wires (some sixth sense tells him to avoid power cables) he has never until now shown much interest in clothing. Trainers possibly, but certainly not woollen stockings.
True, on this occasion I had slothfully discarded my plus four stockings on the kitchen floor after coming back from shooting with my cousin – very good, thank you: high wind, meteoric birds, missed everything. So it was my fault that George was able to get at them. But that’s what I do every time I get back from shooting: unload all the kit from the car, feed Waffle and/or clean the gun (bit of a tossup which should come first) and then unravel the yard and a half of knitted garters that hold up the stockings. It may be an odd priority but by the end of the day the garters are threatening to cut off all circulation below the knee. The stockings end up where ever they fall and I can slump in front of telly until re energised to go and run a bath. And what does George do?
Only nibble a two inch wide hole out of one heel of a discarded stocking while I am subjecting myself to the usual round of NHS catastrophes, missing teenagers and multiple pile ups that pass for news. It is only on examining the damage that I realise why, possibly, George has gone for the heel of the stocking.
It is not so much the wool but the texture of dried Copydex glue which is roughly akin to plastic. Long before the Women’s Institute south of the Border exhorted us all to make do and mend and give up washing clothes to save the planet I have been repairing shooting stockings with knitted patches cut from old sweaters and gluing them either side of a hole in the heel.
Some find this odd, but it seems extraordinarily wasteful to throw out a perfectly good stocking which is 98 per cent intact, save for one or two holes. Although rather less satisfying than a good darn, the double sided gluing technique is considerably tougher and lasts longer. Unless you let a rabbit into your life. n