Friday 12th May 2006

Have you ever noticed that butterflies never quite come close enough to actually touch your nose. They sort of dangle themselves between your eyes and once they have caught your attention and made you lose interest in the stick you were playing with they flit off so you can’t catch them.

Hedgehog, squirrel and I went round the forest putting up notices about the youth club and just hope that some of the animals will come. I think it will be more a question of whether the parents are happy that it is hedgehog running it than whether any of the younger ones will want to come. We will just have to wait and see.

We went out in the car for what should have been a short drive, however in Belgium there is a tendency to do roadworks which close off whole roads and which involve very long diversions. Most of the time there are sign posts for these. However when it is a really big road they are closing it is as though they give up trying to work out the best route round and just leave you to it. That is ok if you know your way round or have sat-nav. Neither of those is true of my mistress. Her alternative is blundering through, convinced that is she just goes a bit further along here then it must come out where she wanted. Unfortunately she does not carry a compass and does not have a perfect sense of direction. We get there in the end but it is not always the end I was planning on getting to!

I thought I was going to be in trouble yesterday. I had one of those ‘it wasn’t me’ moments. I was playing with rubber rabbit, swinging him round in my mouth, which makes a very satisfying noise as well as feeling good, when I accidentally knocked something off the coffee table with the end. Well I dropped rubber rabbit on the spot and ran to a different bit of the room. My mistress immediately got up to go and see what had happened and I gave her the innocent big brown eyed look but she knew I was guilty. She tried explaining to me that it was much better to own up than pretend I hadn’t done it when there was no one else in the house to play with rubber rabbit. Fair point, but I wonder if she would have been as understanding if I had actually broken something. As it turned out it was only a plastic dinosaur out of the cereal packet but I am giving rubber rabbit a wide birth for a while so that he doesn’t get me into trouble again.