Easter Madness

From a sadly missed and prominent atheist, the late, great Douglas Adams …

… nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, …

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published in 1979 so now the timing is a little off; it is now over 2,000 years since this tragic event. It wasn’t the nailing of a man to a tree that was tragic, it’s the fact that what ensued was bloody Easter, a starting pistol for irrational behaviour.

Satan’s Little Disciples had been stuffed back in school for a mere two weeks before they were let back out again for another two free weeks to terrorize the world. Haven’t they missed enough schooling already?

That’s normal for Easter, of course but in another couple of respects, this Easter has seemed less than usual.

Francine popped into Waitrose on Good Friday [good?] and failed to find a shoulder of lamb. Mind you, it was the afternoon so no alarm bells yet rang. Easter Sunday was forecast to be sunny so some barbecued lamb sounded appealing. No matter, I thought, I’ll pop into our local butcher early on Saturday morning and get one. Wrong. Apart from one small scrap, the butcher was out of lamb entirely. ¿Que?

Meanwhile, back at Waitrose, there were actually two legs of lamb on their shelves so we lashed out on a mortgage for one of those instead. What the heck, we’re not able to spend the money on travel so let’s treat ourselves. Lamb sorted.

What was now missing from the Waitrose shelves were any Easter eggs. I recall surplus Easter eggs being sold off after any normal Easter but here we were, before Easter Sunday, with none. What was going on? Maybe the bog roll bandits had switched their attention to choccy eggs? Maybe the shops – Waitrose anyway – had stocked less in this blasted pandemic? Maybe the countless pages of forms necessitated by bloody Brexit to get decent European chocolate into the country had not been correctly submitted?

Tell you what, let’s just cancel Easter altogether. Now you’re talking.

Sadly I’m stuck with Easter but at least our barbecued leg of lamb was excellent; I even treated it to being studded with garlic and rosemary. This meant that we had a lamb leg bone left over for foxy.

In preparation for retiring early to read, I put the bone out quite early (21:30) so the first visitor was a blasted black and white cat who licked at it but seemed otherwise unable to make any headway.

Happily, just over an hour later at 22:45, a fox entered stage right. Now I have a real dilemma – had this been a TV program this would’ve been called All New Limpy. This fox looked like a new one to our camera. It has almost no dark muzzle markings and its legs appear less strongly marked with black. The poor creature was really using only three of those legs, the rear left leg being held off the ground for most of the time. [Original Limpy had favoured the front left leg which now looks fixed.]

All New Limpy hobbled over, eventually picking up both sections of the lamb bone [I’d divided it at the joint] and carried them off behind one of our bushes presumably to have a chew in peace.

Maybe these foxes are a bit like the lion with Androcles in that they get thorns in their paws? Alternatively, perhaps a close shave with a car could be to blame? Either way, this was certainly a much worse limp than original Limpy had ever had.