Had a busy day?

This is Manny, a British Giant Rabbit who has not graced these pages very often as, well, hes a rabbit and doesn't do much. In fact rabbits don't, do much that is, they sit and eat, and hop about a bit, eat some more and hop some more and that very much sums up their contribution to Rock HQ and their life in general.

Manny isn't the rabbit who humped to death the chickens earlier in the year, he is a very quiet well behaved rabbit, until yesterday that is.


Both he and Sybil were moved to a luxurious accommodation block a couple of months ago, they went from hutches to a palatial pad as big as the goat house with a nice partition to keep them separate. Within a few hours they had demolished the partition and the sworn enemy rabbits have been firm friends ever since. As ever animals together seem to conspire to cause their owners more work.

They were missing yesterday. It wasn't hard to find them, Manny had discovered his bunny heritage and had dug a massive burrow under the door and was in the process of making a nice place to live under the path.

Suitably chastised for his lack of planning permission he took refuge in his concrete "burrow" and sulked while I hired a JCB to fill the hole in.

Personality Transplant

This is Faith our gorgeous Gordon Setter, a very complex character who is happiest when she is careering around the hill chasing bunnies and foxes. Not that she ever catches one, but if there was a prize for effort she would win it.

She is quite a grumpy character, or rather, has been a grouch. For some reason she has undertaken a radical personality change. Several weeks have passed without a single grump from her. She spent most of yesterday racing around the hill or protecting the farm from all intruders, especially Blackbirds by endlessly running from one end of the track to the other. Most of the time yesterday we were gardening or working on the current priority project, that of building a new set of quarters for the rabbits. This may seem a bit of a pointless task, ours not Faith's, re homing the rabbits but it has become a bit more urgent over the last few days.

The rabbits are pets and sit quietly in their hutches not bothering anyone. The goats on the other hand quite often bother Sybil and Manny, quite often knocking the hutch over in their attempt to liberate the rabbits of their breakfasts. Sybil was so traumatised by yet another aggravated burglary that she took refuge in one of the goat houses currently home to the last batch of chicks. These are quite big now, not big enough to go out with the other birds but a good size. Unfortunately Sybil the traumatised rabbit sought comfort from one of the small chickens, she obviously wanted a special friend and the hapless chicken was smothered to death whilst Syb's gave it the kind of loving only a confused and traumatised rabbit can. A new house is therefore a priority to protect the virtue of the remaining hens from the unatural attentions of a marauding lovesick bunny.

By late afternoon we were running out of wood and I was running out of enthusiasm so we adjourned to the garden where I fought off the attention of an inquisitive shitland pony called Trevor as he tried to sample my cheese and onion sandwich and my glass of wine. For a moment I did consider letting him sample the wine, thinking the hangover might teach him a lesson, however the prospect of a drunk belligerent pony rampaging around attempting world domination as opposed to having just a belligerent pony rampaging around attempting world domination was too awful to bear so good sense prevailed.

The occupants of the garden settled down to a lazy Sunday afternoon once the food was gone and Faith continued in her quest to be nice to everyone by settling down to sleep by Daffodil the Ryeland lamb on the patio.

It was a blissful, peaceful afternoon.

Until the goats climbed the cliff again and chaos ensued.