Carry On My Wayward Parents

My Dear Fellow,

There are rabbits at the Gyle. It doesn’t even warrant a mention and you are supposed to be blasé about it. Sort of like Edinburgh Castle. If you were to go “Ooh! Edinburgh Castle!” every time you walked past Edinburgh Castle people would think you were a bit odd. And so I have trained myself not to go, “Squeee! Bunnies!!” every time I see a rabbit outside the office. 

But you know that is how I really feel inside, right?
 
Lacking scale, you may not be able to tell from the picture, but this is not only a bunny, but a teeny-tiny BABY bunny as well. They get much bigger than this. And he posed politely, which is unusual and looked just adorable and he left me humming “Bright Eyes” to myself.
 
That song reminds me of a story which I may have related before, but it is funny so I shall repeat it. 

Picture it – Yorkshire in the early 80’s and we have just discovered video recorders. There was no such thing as NetFlix or Blockbuster back then, just an enterprising chap called Colin who opened the “Hollywood Video Library” on Victoria Road in Scarborough. He was a bit like the Yorkshire version of Del Boy. He didn’t just rent video tapes, you could also buy dodgy carpet from him – in the shape of other people’s living rooms nudge nudge wink wink say no more. His shop was tatty and ramshackle and filled with wobbly 2nd hand furniture on which dusty video cases were displayed. Because this was the early days of video you could see “Zombie Flesh Eaters” alongside “The Sting” and “Hoppity Goes To Town” proudly displayed next to “Electric Blue Number 3".
 
If you were to rent any of these tapes you were likely to get a copy of a copy of a copy. And sometimes it would be of a film that wasn’t even at the cinema yet. I saw “E.T.” months before any of my mates, and I remember Colin pushing a pirate copy of “Raiders of the Dark Ark” to my mum in a conspiratorial whisper. But he was no Tarantino-esque Blockbuster Video movie-geek who could give good viewing advice. I remember once my nan asking for a good ‘orror film and he offered her “Eraserhead” because it looked a bit scary and had a weird picture on the cover. So it could all be a bit random is what I'm trying to say.
 
On one occasion he offered a “war film” to my parents. That sounded fine. We all liked war films; “The Guns of Navarone”, “The Dirty Dozen” and so on. It was only when we got it home and sat to watch it as a family that we realised that yes – technically – it was SET during WW2 but that in all other ways “SS Experiment Camp” wasn’t so much about the naked aggression of mankind, it was just about the naked.
 
As an 11 year old I had NO idea what was going on. Or why everyone was nude and being whipped. I possibly asked my dad who the baddies were.
 
So it got switched off in a hurry after that. Thinking a nice cartoon about bunnies would calm things down, my parents put on Colin's second offering. This was a pirate copy of “Watership Down” with Arabic subtitles. Ironically this traumatised me even worse than the nipple-clamp Nazis movie. This film was about bunnies yes, but these were MEAN bunnies! There was blood! And death! True, it was lacking electrodes clamped to the wossname but in all other ways it was much more disturbing than perverted Nazis assaulting each other with cucumbers.
 
So that is what the song “Bright Eyes” brought back to mind as I walked away. Fortunately, some builder on the nearby housing development had his radio on and “Carry On My Wayward Son” was playing. The only association I have to that song is Stephen Colbert doing this. Ah, I do love a bit of Chuck Noblet.

Parsones