Innovative Solutions

We spent some time over coffee on Sunday morning carefully planning out the week ahead.

We came up with a brilliant busy timetable of going to Asda and finishing tiling and preparing school picnics and sewing skirts and clearing untidy things out of the garden, and then realised this morning that we had forgotten that we were supposed to be working all night on several of the nights and had forgotten completely to factor in that we would need to sleep.

This made it entirely improbable that we would actually get very much of it done. If you have got to sleep until lunchtime and then go and do a school run at three it is unlikely that you are going to take a taxi to pieces and fit some new wheel bearings in the intervening time.

No matter how carefully we reconsidered it all we came up against the same difficulty every time, which is that the days are simply not long enough. If we included our usual inevitable and time consuming interludes of emptying the dog or just sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and giggling, then we had barely got enough time to achieve nothing at all.

We sat on the taxi rank considering this dolefully this afternoon, having spent half of the morning asleep and the other half messing about getting tidy things done, like emptying rubbish bins and wiping stray bits of sandwiches and pasta out of kitchen corners. So much to do, so little time, we thought, and then I had a brainwave.

We would get a new dog.

With hindsight I can’t exactly recall the train of thought that led me to this surprising conclusion, it can hardly be called a solution, but Mark has been married to me for a long time and one of the things I have always loved about him is his kindly practice of saying yes to things unless they are completely hare brained, and sometimes even then if I want them enough: so within an hour we had abandoned taxi driving and were on our way down the motorway to Pilling, to buy a new dog for £25 whose owners had got too elderly to be able to take her for walks any more.

We collected our dog on the way and explained to him that we had sorted out an arranged marriage for him. We apologised that his intended was not white and fluffy, which has always been his particular penchant, but since he was small and scruffy and fairly undesirable he would just have to put up with whatever he could get.

We had to hurry up then, because somebody from Sheffield had wanted to buy the dog as well and we had got absolutely no intention of letting them get to it first, especially because we had promised our dog that he was going to be married, and it would have been awful to disappoint him.

It was a nice journey down, it is always nice to go on journeys together. We passed some lorries carrying huge round things, which I thought were flying saucers, but Mark said were for enriching uranium, and then explained to me what that was. I like listening to him being clever and well informed, but didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, so it was a good job he didn’t say: “Now tell me what I have just been talking about,” which he does sometimes if he thinks I am being particularly thick.

The dog belonged to some kind old people who thought it would be happier in a home with children and another dog and exercise, because they had crumbly hips and couldn’t manage any more. This was a horrible thing because they knew they had to let her go and the man cried.

We felt awful and promised faithfully that we would look after her and love her and let her sleep on our bed along with our own dog. Actually I am not entirely sure about that because our bed is already a bit full, and if our dog suspects we might be about to do anything that might exclude him he comes and lies watchfully on the quilt in between us. It might be sensible to try and persuade both dogs that they could try the floor, not that I would expect a great deal of enthusiasm for that, we might have to try it ourselves.

So we are a two-dog family. The new dog is called Molly and is three years old and a mixed up breed, with soft fur and a great deal of enthusiasm for life. We took them both for a walk this evening, and she dashed happily all over the place sniffing absolutely everything, because Mark used to train sheepdogs and does not believe that a dog on a lead is under proper control, so our dogs have to behave themselves and walk obediently to heel without, which they do beautifully when Mark is around, and ignore everything and charge about when it is only me.

Anyway, we have solved the problem of not having any time to do anything.

We are not going to bother doing any of it.

We are going sit at the table and drink coffee and take the dogs for walks and have nice times instead.