THE WEASEL : Now rabbit showjumping has reached the status of a national sport in Sweden, though it has some way to go before it reaches the popularity of assembling flat-pack furniture

The natty outfits. The attractive farmyard smell. There's something magnificent about showjumping. All that braying, snorting and stamping, some of it involving horses.

Unfortunately, all this splendour is too expensive for most people to contemplate. Ideal, perhaps, for the likes of Derek Hatton, who spent the early Nineties ferrying his horse-mad daughters around the country in a pounds 35,000 Ford V8 horsebox, including a television, microwave, and accommodation for four people and six horses, before it was stolen. But for normal mortals...

Luckily, the egalitarian Scandinavians have come up with the answer. For the past ten years, Swedish pet owners have been training their rabbits to jump small obstacles. Now rabbit showjumping has reached the status of a recognised national sport, though it has some way to go before it rivals the popularity of assembling flat-packed furniture.

Crowds all over Sweden flock to see the highly trained competitors negotiating hurdles closely modelled on actual horse showjumping courses, albeit somewhat scaled down. A rabbit can jump obstacles up to three feet high with appropriate encouragement.The secret is early training: left to their own devices, rabbits tend to head downwards rather than upwards.

Last November, a national body was organised for the new sport and now there are 23 clubs catering for about 4,000 fiercely competitive jumping bunnies. There are also clubs in Denmark and Norway, where last year's championship was won by a buck called Ole Hoiland. His prize, it is said, was a passionate tryst with a floppy-eared love-bunny called Solvi. Readers of Jilly Cooper's equestrian novels may find this scenario somewhat familiar.

Of course, it will be argued that sending various domestic examples of Oryctolagus cuniculus out to do battle before crowds of baying enthusiasts is cruel, but in comparison with what happens to most of their peers this is a veritable rest-cure. At least when they're leaping enthusiastically through the air with a little harness around their necks they're not being treated to an extremely close look at various cosmetics and household cleaning products.

"Jumping rabbits live longer than other rabbits," confirms Lisbeth Jansson, whose daughter Louise owns the current Swedish national champion. "And they like jumping: otherwise they wouldn't jump. That's the natural way for a rabbit to move." Flames of Flame, as he is known, won two gold and one silver medals at last year's championship, bringing his total victories in one year to an impressive 34. He is, apparently, a very popular performer. "He's the King," says Mrs Jansson, "Everybody wants to look at the King."

The first European rabbit showjumping championships take place in Denmark later this year. It remains to be seen whether the British, driven into a frenzy of competitiveness by Mr Major's new regime of compulsory games and cold showers, will be represented. Ironically, this is a British sport that has slipped away from us. Early in the Eighties, people in Sweden saw a clip from That's Life, of children teaching their bunnies to jump, and were moved to emulate the practice. The competitions soon followed. It is perhaps just as well that they didn't get Nationwide, or duck skateboarding would be sweeping Scandinavia.

Sadly, it seems unlikely that any of our bunnies will be mounting the winner's rostrum (or anything else) in Denmark. As yet, there seem to be no showjumping rabbits in the country. Still, it's early days. The sport has only recently received its first write-up here, in a book called The Pet Owner's Guide to Rabbits, since when its author, Marianne Mays, has been bombarded with inquiries. "It's a very, very small part of the book," her husband tells me, in the long-suffering tones of one who wishes he'd never ever heard of the phenomenon.

It is probably not too late for some enthusiast to enter the championship, but there is a snag. Win or lose, your best jumpers would have to stay in quarantine for six months after the event, which would hardly help their training schedule.

You could bring them back into the country: but you'd have to eat them first.

An idyllic Sunday lunch in the country has left this decidedly urban Weasel contemplating a move: and rejecting the idea. It took place in the garden of a thatched cottage in one of those villages that seems not to have changed in centuries. Lunch was served outdoors, beside fragrant rose bushes and trees of ripening fruit. A gentle stream tinkled merrily beyond the lawn. Later, a flock of Beatrix Potter ducks wandered up to join us.

Lunch over, we were drawn across the way to a cricket field bounded by mature trees and a lake, and watched for a few minutes as the home side collapsed. My host, no mean sportsman, essayed a few half-hearted swipes with an imaginary bat and let out a deep sigh. "Why don't you join," I suggested, innocently. "You could probably do better than most of them." "They don't pick this side on merit," came the reply, and out poured a sorry tale illustrating the remarkable capacity of English people to make other English people miserable.

Like so many villages within commuting distance of London, this one seems riven with dissent. The newcomers, who have the jobs in the City which provide the money to buy the houses that great- grandfather Jack built, talk mainly to each other. The other villagers stay out of their way, except, of course, if they have a house to sell. Every so often open hostility breaks out, usually over that perennial source of neighbourly tension, car parking. The rest of the time it is sudden silences in the pub, terse exchanges in the village shop, a whole sorry saga of misunderstanding and embarrassment.

Those who peddle Class War in Hackney and Moss Side don't know the half of it. And all the while the village looks so peaceful, so clean, so bucolic: this may be, of course, because there are few children and no adolescents. Perhaps they're away at boarding school.

All in all, it was a relief to return to the city, where no one under the age of 25 has a job - but they all have mobile phones; where tattooed spiders' webs on neck and chin are a popular fashion item; and where the hostility, especially in warm weather, is out in the open.

How quickly new technology declines from thrilling, to commonplace, to plain tedious. One minute the famous Internet is going to usher in what the enthusiasts at Wired magazine wittily call "renaissance.2"; the next it's a replacement for the Yellow Pages.

The Weasel's unending search for the world's least interesting Internet stories has struck gold with the discovery of a couple of absolute winners on the "World Wide Web". There is, for instance, a site operated by a family bakery in Whitby, which permits the bespectacled denizens of cyberspace to order fresh plum bread, biscuits and gingerbread, though what they're like by the time they arrive in California is anybody's guess.

Now I read that the South Bucks Star has gone "on-line", ensuring that people crouched over terminals in Los Alamos or Geneva can be in constant touch with the big stories in Gerrards Cross, for instance whether anyone has lost a dog.

The sheer preposterousness of this may, however, be matched by the promise I read on a handout recently, in which a firm of estate agents claimed that their customers' property details would reach 35 million people (they would need to, of course, given the current state of the property market). Once again, the Internet was to blame.

"All estate agents promise you the world. Only we deliver it," boasted the leaflet. Unfortunately, delivery didn't seem to be this particular firm's strong point. The leaflet was among a pile of several dozen in a litter bin, presumably where some bored terrestrial leaflet distributor had decided to dump them.