I have advertised our poopies for sale on the Internet.
I have been motivated to do this by the fascinating discovery that the white spots on my fingernails and aching joints might actually really be being caused by Vitamin D deficiency. This is being described as a Lake District plague at the moment, due to a year of prolonged rubbish weather.
Certainly we have not had enough sunshine to change colour, when I checked tonight on the patch of skin underneath my wedding ring, I discovered that it is the exact same pasty white as all the rest of me.
I would very much not like my bones to go rotten and my mind to crumble away into senility just yet, which the all-knowing Internet gloomily forecasts as the inevitable result of inadequate sunbathing, and I am fed up of having my trousers rolled up and wet feet. Also it is so cold and miserable here today that people walking past the taxi rank are wearing scarves and woolly hats, as well as overcoats and umbrellas and wellies.
This is not great August weather.
Hence I would like a holiday, and it suddenly dawned on me that the sale of some poopies might be a relatively effortless way to raise a bit of extra cash and jet off into glorious sunshine before the end of the year. Even chugging off into low cloud in the camper would be an improvement.
It is suddenly dreadfully sad to be plotting to sell the poor innocent poopies, gambolling happily around the floor without an idea in the world that the harsh market of animal profiteering exists, and they are about to be heartlessly abandoned to the highest bidder.
I am looking at them with terrible guilt in my soul, it is like selling your children into slavery, except probably more lucrative.
We needed some photographs to put on an advertisement, and took lots when it stopped raining for half an hour this morning. Most of them are of blurred poopies disappearing out of the picture, but a handful are just about recognisable as being of dogs, and so they will have to do.
I spent this evening sadly drafting an advertisement to go with them, which when I re-read it sounded more like a begging advertisement for Save The Children than a piece of marketing literature for poopies.
I took Lucy home at ten, and when she opened the back door all eight of them leapt out of their box and dashed round her feet, jumping excitedly and giving happy little wuffs. She sat on the floor and was instantly submerged underneath a joyful mass of fluff and waving tails, and I sloped back off out to work miserably feeling like Judas.
Of course we could not possibly keep ten dogs, certainly not in the same house as the carpet. It simply wouldn’t be kind anyway, poopies need to be special to somebody: but this sensible thinking does not make me feel any better at all.
I am going to miss them all very much, their enthusiasm and their love of life; their savage growls when they chase one another, and their little bounces of excitement and surprise. Everybody should have poopies at least once in a lifetime, if only to remind themselves to laugh more often.
They have made us laugh so very much, they have been warm and cuddly and funny, and so wholehearted about everything. They play with their whole souls, and then collapse into sudden exhausted sleep. I have liked having them so much I don’t even really mind about the poor carpet.
I suppose really the point is that we have got to sell them, and if we are going to do something thrilling with the money then we won’t mind so much: but goodness me, I hope we can find happy homes.
I have put the advert on the pet-selling website, and am waiting for approval.
I should price them at thirty pieces of silver.
