"THE BURROW BUGLE"

Not-So-Innocents Abroad

ben trovato writes:

This is the Authorised Account of Anticant’s travels to the lake shores of Italy, Any scurrilous anecdotal reportage on other blogs is purely apocryphal.

Oscar Wilde feasted with panthers. Robert Louis Stevenson traversed the Cevennes in the company of a diminutive cross-grained donkey. Anticant ventured forth with a Lilith-like White Leopardess and a lineal descendant of Apuleius’ loquacious Golden Ass. Strange to relate, he lived to tell the tale.

The tediums of air travel, with its ridiculously long check-in times and interminable security procedures – we even had to take our shoes off: trousers, mercifully, were reprieved – did not damp the trio’s enthusiasm for the expedition, though the two days of quite heavy rain during the week’s lakeside stay did disappoint a little. However, in the intervals between showers the sun obliged quite warmly, and sitting upon the hotel terrace and jetty, watching boats go by and sampling the local vino and home-baked pastries, induced a mood of unaccustomed near-serenity. Anticant even resisted the temptation to check out the Burrow postings until nearly the end of the week, though when he did so he immediately alerted the Beadle to secrete the Snug keys in the inner pocket of his uniform knickers, in anticipation of a marauding raid by the Wild Woodlanders which fortunately did not materialise.

Some scrumptiously tasty food was consumed, and an abundance of strong liquor poured down the throats of the insatiably thirsty trio. This sometimes led to verbal skirmishings but these never degenerated into fisticuffs – although through a linguistic confusion Anticant had been mistakenly identified by the hotel staff as a world-famous boxer!

Returning to Blair’s Britain provided the usual nasty culture shock, with planes late, coaches missed, and tasteless fast food airport sandwiches. A plot to smuggle in a litter of five adorable baby kittens from the hotel gardens was canvassed but reluctantly dropped.

And was there mischievous mayhem, skulduggery and prankishness? There was – but the Court Circular Reporter’s lips are sealed, and supposedly inside revelations elsewhere are to be severely discounted on pain of withdrawal of Snug free round privileges.

So back to business as usual? Not quite, as Anticant’s attitude to blogging, as to much else, is for the time being at least considerably relaxed and liable to result in some summer lassitude and less anxious attention to the endless sad goings-on in the lousy world outside the Burrow.