Mirth and Woe: Bunny Boiler

Mirth and Woe: Bunny Boiler

This is a true story of woe.

Proper woe – for I am warning you now – there is very little mirth to be had.

This is, then, a true story of woe about the woman I love, and I have shared my life with ever since a memorable, squelchy day in 1987.

I don't know what's in your filthy mind. I'm just saying it rained on our first date.

The charming Mrs Duck, as a child, lived on one of the more – let us be charitable here – troubled estates in the Berkshire county town of Reading. OK, let's not be charitable. It was dog rough, where even the muggers had to go around in packs.

You could – she said – leave your front door on the latch all day. All your furniture and everything you owned would be gone by lunchtime, but it was THAT kind of community.

There was precious little Love Thy Neighbour to be had, except if you counted all the rutting away like council estate chavs that you get these days. Back in the seventies, it was rough, but you got a receipt.

Mrs Duck's family live next door to – and let us be charitable once again – a right bunch of fucking bastards. They were a family with three of the most evil, vindictive, bullying little shits imaginable. If only they had a brain cell between them they might have constituted some sort of danger to society. Instead, they were just plain nasty, and like all bullies, they didn't like it up 'em.

My charming wife, as a child, had a rabbit. It was called Lucky.

Lucky would hop around his run contentedly, eating carrots and generally being cute.

This state of affairs continued for several weeks, right up to the moment that the little shits next door thought it might be funny to introduce their dog – some sort of Rottweiler crossed with a bastard – to Lucky.

Lucky was found – as you might expect – sans head in various parts of the garden, whilst protests to the Cro-Magnon man who may or may not have been their father were met with "Yeah? What the fack are you gonna do abaht it then?", only with somewhat less charm and markedly more violence than I can put across here.

Unlucky Lucky.

Several months later, the evil bastard kids next door got their own ickle rabbit.

"What was he called?" I ask, trying to glean a little colour to beef up this sad, sad tale.

"Wanker, I think."

I cannot condone what happened next. In fact, I am still mildly disgusted with my beloved, who – and I have told her on several occasions- made baby Jesus cry through her actions.

By way of revenge, the young Mrs Duck concocted a bucket full of everything in her old dad's shed which had a skull-and-crossbones on the bottle. The end result was probably mildly explosive and certainly very, very poisonous.

Throwing this bucket of jollop into next door's garden certainly killed everything that hadn't already been eaten by Tosspot the Rottweiler, but also did for Bastard Bunny, the little bastards' bastard bunny.

The shits arrived home, and there was great gnashing of teeth, and the words "Yeah? What the fack are you gonna do abaht it then?" thrown back in Cro-Magnon man's face.

She laughed, the vile poisoner, the terrible, terrible bunny boiler. And in seventeen years of marriage, I never started a meal until somebody else has tasted it. Just to be safe, like.

And then: "S'funny thing about that rabbit I bumped off", she eventually confesses.

"What? WHAT?"

"Didn't have a head."

Ah.

Unlucky Wanker.


Speaking of unlucky wankers, this tale of mirth and woe from Debster.