Taking a closer look, my friend was dismayed to recognise it as the pet rabbit that belonged to Susan, the young daughter of the family next door.

My quick-thinking friend came up with a plan. He put the rabbit (which by now was a dirty mess) in the kitchen sink and with warm water and some shampoo, he cleaned up the dead bunny as best he could.

Then he took a hair dryer (I suppose in context it was actually a hare drier - sorry about that!) and blow-dried the bunny until it looked pretty good.

Finally, under the cover of darkness, he crept into the next-door garden and placed it carefully in the cage. He kind of fluffed it up so that it looked very natural.

The next morning, he looked out the window and noticed a crowd of people gathered around the rabbit hutch. Everyone seemed to be talking and pointing. My friend decided to go over and act like any normal curious neighbour and find out what was going on.

When he got there, Susan's mother was telling everyone what had happened.

"You won't believe this" she was saying "It's a miracle! Susan's pet rabbit died two days ago - and we buried that little bunny right over there..."

Have you ever tried to cover up one wrongdoing with another? Covering up only makes matters worse.

When we get caught doing something wrong, for example, we may attempt to cover it up with a lie. But just like Susan's pet rabbit, the result is never what we expected. We end up looking foolish.

We would have been better off admitting we were wrong and accepting the consequences, rather than continuing to dig an ever-deepening hole for ourselves.

As Denis Healey once said "The first rule of digging holes - is to stop digging!". He was talking about political untruth, of course, but the first record of this rule goes back much further, to the Ten Commandments.

Number eight says - "Don't tell lies!".