Tsuro

A rabbit has moved in with us. It's not a very big rabbit, perhaps a few weeks old, but it seems very confident in the way it has taken over the garden. We bump into it occasionally and, although it runs away, it doesn't go far.

Yesterday I spent some time sitting in the sunshine watching it. Happily, at the moment its main food seems to be grass, and it's welcome to as much of that as it wants. It has yet to have a go at any of the other plants - as far as we can see - so I'm not sure how we're going to react if we find it has eaten our vegetables or a rather precious ornamental plant.

I've decided to call it Tsuro, which means rabbit in Shona, one of the languages of what is now Zimbabwe. When we were in that country - between 1967 and 1970, when it was called Rhodesia - I used to....

....run the school's farm club. Our most ambitious project was to rear rabbits for use in the school's kitchen, and to sell to a local butcher. The scheme went horribly wrong, so we lost a fair amount of money, but I came away with the nickname Tsuro, which I rather liked. What I didn't miss was the killing and dressing of as many as fifty rabbits each Wednesday afternoon.

I learned a great deal from the rabbit fiasco. I'm just sorry that the 'business' involved the murder of so many rather pretty little animals.

I have other good reasons for feeling rather affectionate towards rabbits, of which more anon.