Mad Pets
Condensed from : www.stevedix.de/blog/489

I could fill a book with descriptions of the mad pets we've had.

There was "Mitzy Binkle" my sister's huge psycho white rabbit that used to beat up cats. Lassie, our whippet, was an escape artist and thief par excellence, and once managed to come home triumphantly clutching, just like in the Beano, a whole string of sausages. I suffered for her thieving, taking the rap for eating, amongst other things - a whole pork pie, and all the chocolate ornaments off the christmas tree.

The classic mad pet owner, however, was my Aunt Annie. Amongst her pets (described at greater detail above), she owned a parrot that could impersonate her daughter telling my uncle to get up to go to work at the colliery - which it often did at two in the morning, and a gander and a goat, either of which was enough to see off any intruders. Together, they formed an impenetrable security shield. It was bad enough that the goat would constantly try and headbutt anyone approaching the door, irrespective of whether they were friends, family, post or milkmen, but the real problem was that the geese and the goat were working together. Whilst you were busy flailing at the geese, the goat would charge you from behind.

As a child I grew to fear Aunt Annie's back garden. Should we misbehave whilst the grown-ups were talking, we would be sent to play there. By "play" I mean "run in circles, screaming, whilst being attacked". I was in short trousers, and my knees are still covered in goosebill-shaped scars from "playing with the animals." I've had a pathological fear of wearing shorts ever since.

Length? Every second in that garden was an eternity of pain. Long enough?
( Stevedix http://www.stevedix.de/blog, Fri 8 Jun 2007, 13:38, Reply)