I have been awake for rather a lot of the night.
I kept having dreams that I was at the opera listening to sopranos singing terribly out of tune: and woke up to discover that a couple of the puppies had strayed off the quilt and had got stuck behind Mark’s box of ties, where they were squeaking their heads off, much to their mother’s helpless horror.
I rescued them.
After a while I rescued them again. A little while later I tugged their quilt up into a wall against the side of the box so that they couldn’t do it again.
After that of course every distressed squeak woke me up. Every time a puppy got squished under a pile of other puppies, or lost its mouthful of its mother, or wriggled into an unhappily cool spot the dog and I both leapt out of fitful dozing to save it.
Take it from me, puppies are very noisy creatures. The difficulty of having eight of them is that there is almost always at least one which is very aggrieved about something, and complaining loudly.
Mark and the puppies’ father both snored peacefully.
By morning the dog and I were both exhausted. I had a cup of coffee and she wolfed the leftover chicken, and she collapsed into sleep and I went to put the washing on.
We had got to get up because of expecting a visitor. Number Two Daughter had a very naughty squaddie in her taxi a few nights ago, who sang some shockingly tasteless songs, had a fight in the back seat and punched the side of the taxi when Number Two Daughter told him what she thought of him and chucked him out.
Stupidly he left his beret in the taxi, so we asked Number One Daughter to identify the cap badge and discovered he was a marine, so we rang the provost to offer to return it and also to tell them what a naughty soldier they had got.
Being the Marines, they took it very seriously indeed, and were horrified to discover that any of their glorious heroes knew rude songs and got into fights, and this morning they sent a gentleman from the Military Police round to retrieve the beret and take a full statement of all his rascally doings. Number Two Daughter explained how big and rough and scary he had been and the Marine policeman was very apologetic.
He was there for ages. I did the ironing whilst he wrote it all down, and listened whilst Number Two Daughter concluded plaintively that she had been so upset that she had phoned her mummy at two in the morning to talk about how traumatised she was.
I remembered mildly guiltily that I had laughed and told her to man up, which had seemed to both of us to be sensible advice at the time. However the Marine policeman seemed to think that little girls driving taxis should not have rude words said to them by soldiers, which fascinated both of us. I wish they would come and be policemen round here. I would save myself an awful lot of driving about and just leave most of my customers in the cells.
When he had gone Number Two Daughter went off to the gym, where she is currently doing deadlifts of a hundred and twenty kilos in order to try and out lift Number One Daughter and also to put some muscle behind her punches should she need to eject any more soldiers from her taxi for saying rude words. I stayed at home and made a curtain for the camper van, because I am fairly indifferent to rude words and have solved this problem by acquiring a very functional vocabulary of rude words of my own.
I made a picnic and then went back to sleep, to be rudely awoken when the dog returned from a call of nature and accidentally sat on a couple of puppies, who protested loudly and vociferously, making their meaning extraordinarily clear despite the absence of sophisticated vocabulary.
They could have outdone any Marine.
