Cassandra is the best stripper in town (to the tune of Patricia the Stripper)

The day after our island adventures, the Terror awoke unable to open one eye properly.  I waited till ½ an hour after the vets had opened (so as not to appear totally neurotic) before rushing him up there, attempting not to sob ‘MY BABY!!!  MY BABY IS BROKEN!  FIX HIM!

The lovely lady vet (who is of a proper age to be a vet and know things and be responsible; the other vet is nowt but a whippersnapper and should still be in short trousers in my opinion) poked and prodded at him; put some nuclear green goo in his eye which seeped down his whiskers and came out of his nose, giving him the appearance of a zombie alien dog; peered in his eye and declared him to have scratched the cornea, probably on a thorn on one of his psychopath sprees through the undergrowth.

She filled him full of penicillin and painkillers; instructed me to ‘keep him quiet’ while I gaped at her dumbfounded, and charged me £88 for the privilege on the way out, while the Terrror attempted to eat an old lady’s pet bunnikins in the waiting room (it probably didn’t actually die of the fright, and even if it did, I’m sure the vets could revive it, for a price).

Once home, Bunnygate turned out to be the Terror’s last hurrah for that day, as whatever the vet had given him knocked him out and made him a docile and biddable dog (ie normal).  I took advantage of his semi rohypnoled state to try and strip his coat. 

For those who haven’t enjoyed such delights, I only discovered after the Terror took possession of us that you are not supposed to clip Border Terriers, as this is very bad for them.  This is also very bad for you, because if you do clip them, whiskery old ladies with their own Border Terriers in tow will pursue you down the street, berating you for your filthy clipping ways. 

Instead, you have to strip them.  This basically involves spending several hours sitting pulling all the dead hair out of their coat (nice)!  If you do this, this whiskery old ladies will still pursue you down the street , but with marginally more approval, to demand terrifying questions of you such as “Do you strip yourself” and volunteering such mind boggling nuggets as “I’ve been stripping for 40 years y’know”.  All you can think is “Please, old whiskery lady in your tweed skirt and sturdy brogues, STOP talking about your passion for stripping, it sounds so wrong!”

Even once you have agreed to embark on a lifetime of stripping (turns out jokes about nipple tassles go down extremely badly), you still have a minefield to negotiate.  For example, if you get the eyebrows wrong, your Border Terrier could look like a miniature Schnauzer!!!!!!  Oh the humanity.  Apparently, if you make your terrier look like a Schnauzer, terrible things could happen!   Plagues of locusts and boiling seas and Four Horsemen type horrors.  It is a great responsibility to have the Apocalypse hanging upon your dog’s eyebrows!

I am not very good at the whole eyebrows and face thing, not least because even in a semi comatose state the Terror tends to bite when I try to do them, so I spend a lot of time hiding from the upstanding Border Terrier owners with their correct eyebrows, lest they realise it was me who brought about the end of the world.

At the end of the afternoon’s stripping (“With a swing of her hips, she started to strip...) I was left with a large pile of greyish fur on the floor.  The Beast wandered in and looked at it. 
“It looks like Grandma’s hair” he said.  “Let’s make her a wig out of it.”