Who Could Win a Rabbit?

Hungry bread and butter hustle

You’ve been doing it a while, it is only fair

Where’s your relaxation?

Where’s the time required for your health?

~ Animal Collective, ‘Who Could Win a Rabbit?’ Lyrics by Noah Lennox

I was put in mind of this song yesterday after a call-out on the radio for songs themed around rabbits (it was, apparently, the anniversary of the publication of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit). ‘Who Could Win a Rabbit?’ is track two of Animal Collective’s album Sung Tongs, and is a typically weird, jangly, hooting-and-howling tune from these purveyors of surrealist forest-folkrock from their headiest days of jangle and screech. I often return to Animal Collective at this time of year because they remind me of my days as a fresher back in 2005/06. This was a time pre-Spotify, just on the cusp of music streaming becoming a thing, so we all trooped up to University with choice selections from out CD collections which we would swap around for burning to our various chunky laptops. At some point, someone left the album Feels by Animal Collective in my room, so I duly burned it, listened to it a few times, and didn’t really get it at first. But those were also the days of scouring through Academy gig listings, enduring various unsigned support acts, all caught up in the mid-00s buzz of the indie floor-fillers. So I found myself going back to Feels again and again, beguiled by the screechings of ‘Grass’ and the moody lyrics of ‘Banshee Beat’ (Someone in my dictionary’s up to no good / I never find the special words I should). It has since become one of my very favourite albums, unfailingly mysterious and weird.

Fifteen years on, the fresher experience is, quite suddenly, wildly different. Just as Steve Lamacq was calling for rabbit-themed songs, I was driving past the Birley Fields campus of MMU where hundreds of first year students are locked down in their halls of residence with the ‘rona, and have adorned their windows with post-it note witticisms and protests. ‘I hate my flatmates’ one read, alongside ‘9K 4 wat?’ and ‘Send Beer’. I had just picked up Hannah from her work at neighbouring University of Manchester (where I am currently still a student, just about). Yep, she’s been on campus, sitting in a room on her own because the powers-that-be have determined that students need to have some face-to-face contact, because of the aforementioned 9K, and this apparently includes admin staff. Hannah works for Student Support and has been at the COVID coalface this week, chipping away at the vast wall of emails from students reporting their infections and isolations. There are loads. The pandemic literally unfolds before her eyes in Outlook, taking down one hall of residence at a time. It would be astonishing if it wasn’t so tragic. Just as I went to bed last night, I saw the Manchester Evening News reporting on infections in Owen’s Park, that behemoth of UoM student residency. Tip of the iceberg, mate.

We got home, safe and sound, and fed our house rabbits, Marble and Finch. I sang a few lines of ‘Who Could Win a Rabbit?’ at them and they gave me that quiet ‘WTF’ look that rabbits are especially good at. These beautiful creatures have become my favourite of all animals since we got our first house bunny, two years after I discovered Feels. Delphi (RIP) and her friend George (RIP) became our whole world at a crucial stage in our relationship. We’d officially moved in together, into a flat which, coincidentally, was directly opposite what would become the Birley Fields campus. We went against the ‘No Pets’ clause in our contract and began our twelve year devotion of all things rabbit and guinea pig. But it was Delphi and George who stole my heart. Rabbits have this strange and pure duality of energy and quietude. One minute they can be charging around, binkying, chewing carpets and wires, thumping their ridiculous feet, the next they’re sprawled out across the floor, quieter than mice, just existing. Marble and Finch often sit with us when we’re watching TV, on the floor in front of the screen. Even when they’re doing absolutely nothing they’re a gorgeous distraction.

The girl of the pair, Marble, is getting old. Her back legs are weakening and she’s struggling to hop around as much as she used to. She’s also struggling to clean her back feet, which is very unbecoming of such a totemic part of rabbit anatomy, so we’ve taken to cleaning them for her. This involves picking her up (which she doesn’t like), dunking her feet in the sink (which she doesn’t like) and then squeezing her feet to wring out the water (which, actually, she doesn’t seem to mind so much). It’s my job to squeeze the feet and I kind of love doing it. How often do you get to squeeze a rabbit’s foot?

These are the same feet that have been attached to luck, although said feet are usually detached and worn around a human neck, more like a hunting trophy than a talisman. I would suggest they bring much more luck when still attached to the rabbit in question, because they are the bits that do the running and the leaping and the thumping, all of which is soul-cleansingly delightful to watch. When I squeezed them last night, I did think of luck because we’re all in need of a bit more of it right now, if such a thing exists.

Where’s the time required for your health? croon Animal Collective in a song which (I think) is about the importance of taking breaks from the ‘bread and butter hustle’ of work. My big hope for the post-COVID world is that it helps us all reflect a bit more on our lives that are still almost wholly geared towards work and careers. I hope there have been some quiet revelations about the effectiveness of working from home (its been great for Hannah), about the importance of flexible working hours, and, more profoundly, the ways in which our working lives have a tendency to take us away from what’s really important. Those students are trapped in those halls because of a number of reasons, but largely because we’re still adhering, as much as we can, to the ‘normal’ run of things; to the fulfillment and justification of lots of various people’s jobs, including all those attached to university accommodation, teaching, admin and management. There’s an argument to suggest we should never have told this year’s cohort to physically come to Uni, and from a public health perspective that makes total sense. But the bread and butter hustle is a powerful engine that isn’t easily stopped. We’ve lost track of all the fail-safes and valves that slow it down and reveal its mechanical, unfeeling nature. Work is our normal, or our aspiration of normal. The ‘new normal’ needs to seriously reconsider what we think of as work, and how work defines and controls us.

Instead, as of course we’ve always known, it’s far more important that we prioritise ourselves, our loved ones, and our elderly rabbits. All of which is easy to say, and how we do it is a massive and complicated debate, but it may well be a good time to start that discussion. It’s become painfully clear that we have a lot of societal systems which just do not work as we think they do, having become as tired as Marble’s back legs. Let’s hope for some meaningful change. We’ve been doing it a while, it is only fair. I’ll be sure to give those feet an extra squeeze to help it along.