Shut Your Beak…

I like badgers. I like that they’re both a verb and a noun. I like that they snuffle. And I like that they are one of the few interesting species that we’ve got in England, which seems to get a pretty effing raw deal on David Attenborough’s new show. (So far we’ve encountered Jungles, Deserts, Ice Caps and Caves. Not a bloody word about England’s interesting polar region, nor our 10,000 square-mile rain-free zone.)

Badgers were recently in the news. According to urban legend, and as reported by a few reasonably sound news sources, man-eating badgers had been released in Iraq, presumably to ferret out some insurgents or some such. That such a thing might be taken seriously amuses me greatly, and makes me want to repeat the word ‘badger’, because it feels delicious on my lips.

It’s also rather fun to know that my parents’ first names – John and Clare – form the name of the man who wrote a famous poem about badgers. (This I learned from Wikpedia; I don’t read poetry because it confuses me.) The poem is named – perhaps a little simplistically – ‘Badger’.

Why am I writing about badgers, exactly? Because yesterday Jen brought one home.

Ok, so it was actually a garbage disposal unit for the sink, but it still said badger on the outside.

According to the product literature, our new badger insinkerator (nicely done there) is both stylish and functional. For a device that lives under the sink and grinds potato peelings into dust, I felt that the stylish part of this description was somewhat redundant. Mind you, if they release one in Brilliant Red, like my BlackBerry, I’ll be first on the list for a new one.

So, we have our badger. Excellent. Now to install it. Except that it turns out that the old one wasn’t actually broken – Jen poked at it a bit with a screwdriver and fixed it. So now, the brand new stylish badger has to go back to the store.

In order to facilitate this process, I placed the badger on top of the washing machine in the laundry room, which abuts the garage, which contains the cars, which will transport the device back to Lowes.

So – in actual fact, the sentence makes sense. At least, a lot more sense than my friend Pierce’s polite request to his wife whilst on the phone to me: “Honey, please don’t use the speargun to close the curtains”.

Nope, no idea.