Tuesday 16 September 2008

Foxes. Forget the childish cackle of Basil Brush. Put the raffish good looks and the silky fur out of your minds. Think, rather, last night's bacon butty crusts adorning the driveway. Imagine all last week's rubbish strewn in an untidy wave down the pavement. Now I know I'm only doing my thing by putting the rubbish out ... and he's only doing his thing by spreading it around - but this can't go on! I've tried numerous approaches - including disinfectant and other household sprays - but nothing seemed to work. Then, I came up with a new secret weapon - gel spray. This stuff is meant to smell very unpleasant to animals, and its also designed to stick to the bin bags - so what could possibly go wrong? For the first few weeks it worked a treat.

THEN, I was foolish enough to spray it on a slightly breezy evening. This was a seriously bad move. The wind changed direction just at the vital moment - and I got a liberal coating, whilst the bin bags remained untouched. The net result was that the rubbish still smelled as appealing as ever to the fox - but I now smell repulsive to every animal in the neighbourhood ... and possibly to a few humans too! Admittedly I have not been sniffed, nibbled or otherwise disturbed by any fox ever since - but it wasn't exactly Plan A!

The thing is, life's never Plan A, really. I used to have a friend living in war torn Yugoslavia whose favourite phrase was "welcome to contingency world, where Plan A never happens". Wherever you live, it's a pretty unusual day when things go exactly according to plan. When Christians say that "all things work together for good" they don't mean that everything works out just as they had intended. They don't even mean that their lives are always "on the up". Rather, they express an underlying belief that God has his hand on things ... and that even the unexpected can turn out for good. Plan B might be better than Plan A, and might have been the best plan all along.

That said - I'm still a bit wary of my wonderful anti-fox spray ...and I swear the wretched creature has an extra grin on his face every time I see him!