Talking Turtle

The Global Financial Crisis is tedious. It seems to be giving manufacturers a pretext for sending some of our few remaining domestically based industries off shore, Bonds, Dunlop, King Gee and Grosby among them. One hesitates to use the tired 'Australian icons' tag but I can't help thinking that images of Paul Mercurio dancing a duet with a Chesty Bond torso or a cartoon dog ruff ruffing 'Grosby, they're great, mate' now seem quaintly irrelevant. And Robert Drewe's evocation of the dagginess of Dunlop 'volleys' in the 'The Shark Net' is now more firmly sealed in its time capsule than ever! We have a standard of living in Australia that has attracted migrants from all over the world and now the Pacific Group of companies who produce these products has rejected paying even the minimum wage to keep jobs here and is eroding that standard of living and by extension eroding the cultural confidence that produced Paul Mercurio and Robert Drewe and let us enjoy their art.

I am reading 'Turtle' a first 'novel' (it seems unequivocally autobiographical) by Glaswegian Gary Bryson for our book group. Easily our most rambunctious and rollicking choice to date, full of hebridean whimsy and phonetically written passages liberally sprinkled with 'fuck' (which is apparently already spelt exactly as it's pronounced in Glasgow!) While the book has significantly fewer 'fuck's than many I've read it easily holds the record for the most 'wee's! Bryson reserves his most amusing slabs of phonetic utterance for his mother Trixie and a turtle he discovers in the dilapidated Reptile House at the zoo whom he adopts as his mentor. As well as teaching him to swim the turtle is clearly going to help him exorcise his childhood demons. Here's one of Mr Turtle's messages to our protagonist, Donald Pinelli:

Aye
An it wisny jist the swimmin.
Ah taught ye how
tae hold the sweet breath uv freedom in those
stupit mammal lungs uv yours.
How tae kerrry the whole bastardin wurld on yer back.
Ah mean
fuck's sake, pal,
that's whit bein a turtle's aw aboot.

Can't argue with that! I think I'll romp through this choice long before our March 22 meeting.

Bunny, bunny, bunny

Postscript: the Trading Post is the place for bargain bunnies.
This is 'Waldorf'. S/he is a cross dwarf/floppy. Cute, eh?

Losing Lesley/Leslie

Well, I have finished my assignments but not without life and death drama on my doorstep. The Sunday of the week before last our ginger cat was chasing something small and white around the back yard. It was a baby rabbit ‘about the size of a tennis ball’ (to quote my daughter later). It ran into a clump of fishbone fern and I managed to grab it. Knowing that the people over the road had an adult rabbit we took it over to see if it belonged to them. They told us their rabbit had been missing for many months but the previous afternoon it had emerged from beneath their house with a litter of six! They had deposited two with a pet shop, a friend had taken one and we were welcome to keep the bunny who became know as Lesley/Leslie (as its gender was unknown) for its short 24 hours in our care.

Lesley/Leslie was domiciled in a cat carry basket pending delivery of a rabbit hutch we bought on eBay that night. Lesley/Leslie ate carrots, lettuce, pellets and lucerne and was initially fed water with a dropper but quickly showed him/herself able to manage to drink from a tiny earthen ware dish. By the end of the day Leslie/Lesley had sat on the back of the sofa to watch TV with us and had taken part in a photo shoot on our bed.

Cats are supposed to have nine lives. Not sure about bunnies. Lesley/Leslie survived being let out for exercise before school on Monday morning and was retrieved with the help of our neighbour's (a different neighbour’s) landing net. About 1 pm that day my son called me at work to say he’d let Lesley/Leslie out for more exercise and this time the little mite had darted under the house!

Although we spotted that little rabbit several times that evening our attempts to catch him were in vain. We set the alarm for dawn the next day but when there was no sign of Lesley/Leslie, went back to bed. That gave our ginger cat just the ‘window’ he needed. The first neighbour reports that Simon (not Simone, we know the cat’s gender) chased the bunny till it lay exhausted on the nature strip outside our house & when she went to scoop it up it made one last dash for cover. That’s the last time anyone saw Lesley/Leslie!

We, and especially my daughter, have been experiencing the Five Stages of Grief bunny style:

1. Denial and Isolation – it was her sole crusade to find the bunny and she produced a marvellous ‘LOST’ poster. No-one else’s matched her sense of loss and no other bunny was comparable to the missing one.

2. Anger – her brother’s poor judgement in letting Lesley/Leslie out was bordering on criminal and his lack of contrition or participation in the search deserving of verbal and possibly physical abuse.

3. Bargaining – would my husband and I get home early enough to try to find Lesley/Leslie? Or at least to try to catch a sibling?

4. Depression – she has been very, very sad.

5. Acceptance – we are getting a replacement rabbit this weekend!