Wednesday 13 January 2010

Shhhh I'm Hunting Rabbits

Kent: 'The garden of England' Or A Giant Food Plot For Rabbits

If you want an answer: ask the question, ask and ask again, keep turning over stones, keep kissing frogs, until you find the one you want.

Here in Old Blighty there is no hunt-able public land. Animals can be wild and therefore belong to no one, but the land they are standing on is someone’s property and you can’t hunt on it without their permission. No Permission = No wild meat

Meanwhile back in the 'hood

The interview process for a new flatmate had been dragging on. The Co-op sends a list, we call the people, filter out a few nutters and ner-do-wells. Stay in a couple of evenings waiting for no-shows and just when we were thinking we’d have to start again in the new year the corner is turned, a nice chap turns up on one of the interview nights. The others like him and tell me they’re happy to live with him, if I like him he’s got the room.

We’ve chatted for a while. Seems like a good guy, I’m about to tell him he’s got the room if he wants it, when it occurs to me that I’m not just the mild mannered plumber and building contractor from the room next to the kitchen, I also have another identity, an alter ego, a super-hero identity. I’m SBW. The Suburban Bushwacker himself.

So it went something like this:

SBW “It’s only fair to let you know something about the way I live, [pause for dramatic effect] I occasionally come home with dead animals, [another pause for dramatic effect] not from the supermarket, but from nature. Animals that lived wild and free before they became my dinner. I eat road kill, and [one more pause for dramatic effect] I hunt. It’s very important to me, so it’s only fair to let you know up front, in case you’re squeamish about things like that, that I will sometimes be butchering whole animals in the kitchen”

“Really! Well I like eating meat and I’d like to come and hunt it with you”

SBW “ Excellent! As you’re from Kent maybe you can help, I’m looking for a farmer who’s over-run with Rabbits and Deer”

“My dad has a plant nursery, I’m sure he’d love you to come down and kill his Rabbits, they’re a major problem for him because they eat loads of his new plants”

SBW “Welcome home fella”

So the new-year is shaping up well, bathrooms to build, and Rabbits to hunt, wish me luck.

Your pal

SBW