Looks innocent enough, doesn't he?

"Be careful of the rabbit," said Dirk. "He'll eat anything. In fact, he'll eat everything."

I remember smiling to myself when he said that, thinking that the rabbit - or Cachou or Cashew to give him his bilingual names - would have to go some to beat Ottawacker Jr. to any food. But what I had failed to understand was that the rabbit doesn't actually need food to eat, it will literally try to eat anything.

And so, as I was sitting at my laptop checking out what time we were going to leave for tomorrow's Montmorency Falls trip, I saw the battery was coming to the end of its regular cycle. "That's funny," I said to myself, and checked I had put it into the computer properly. Then I checked the plug. And found that my wire, instead of running in a nice long arc from the power source to the laptop, stopped some six inches away from my knee. And there, gnawing the remaining cord into many pieces, all of approximately one inch in length, was the frigging rabbit. Looking innocent. And sweet. And cuddly.

The one thing you could have counted on Mrs. Ottawacker to say at moments like this was that it was not the rabbit's fault, and she didn't disappoint. I powered down the computer, poured myself a large Ricard, and went to sit in the garden.

Other victims of Cachou's lepirine appetite on this day included two apples (taken off the table because we had forgotten to put the chairs in tightly enough); all the leaves off the palm tree; and the power cord to the television (although that might conceivably have been done before).

It's not as if we hadn't been feeding him either; but this rabbit has issues.