End times

I have had so many replies to the advertisement for poopies that I have had to take it down.

This has left me feeling horribly guilty about everybody who has written me such beautiful letters promising that they could love a poopy, there are some lovely kind people in the world.

They are leaving us one by one. Patch went today. He has gone to belong to an old friend of Number Two Daughter. She is not only enthusiastic and youthful, but patient with small leaky creatures, and  will be the gentlest and most thoughtful of owners. I don’t feel in the least worried about him: but even so it was sad to say goodbye to him. He was one of the quietest ones, but there is still a little gap where I have been tripping over him for the past few weeks.

They have all been blockaded downstairs at nights now, because I don’t want poopy leaks in the bedroom, but Roger Poopy, who is a determined little soul, somehow managed to circumnavigate the barricades this morning, and I opened my eyes to a joyous fluffy creature bouncing excitedly and wuffing at the side of the bed. I picked him up, and then wished I hadn’t, because he had got so excited that he had leaked.

In fact Roger has got very good indeed at escaping from places. He has decided that his place is beside people, and he is not at all contented to be left behind at home as if he were just a poopy. I was taking Lucy to work, rather late, this evening, when suddenly I realised that a small brown creature was wuffing wildly and pushing its way determinedly through the lavender bush to freedom. Of course it was Roger. He leapt down and tried to get in the car with us, which was obviously wildly optimistic because of his legs only being about four inches long.

I replaced him in the garden and barricaded the lavender bush, by which time it was five minutes past the time Lucy should have started work: and there was a frantic scrabbling and more anguished wuffing, and a little brown nose appeared over the top of the insurmountable poopy proof barrier, followed by all the rest of Roger, which landed with a surprised thud on the tarmac.

By this time we were so late that I just scooped him up and dumped him on Lucy’s knee, and thus it was that Roger had his first evening working in a taxi.

He curled up quite happily on my knee whilst we were on the taxi rank, but obviously had to hide when customers got in, because taxi drivers are not at all supposed to take tiresome poopies to work with them. He lay very quietly on the mat underneath my feet, and nobody noticed he was there at all, until eventually he became sleepy and Mark dropped him off at home after a handy job going up to Ellerthwaite Square. He was so tired after his adventures that he just crawled into the nest of poopies and fell fast asleep.

We spent the afternoon cleaning the camper van at the farm. We had hoped to paint it this summer, but so far the weather has been too dreadful even to consider it, you have got to have several clear, dry days, and as you know, so far we haven’t.

We thought next week might turn out to be promising, though, so today we obliged the children to volunteer their assistance and went over to the farm.

Mark put the wheels back on the poor camper, and we dragged it out into the sunshine with the dumper truck. Oliver power washed it, and Lucy brushed, and then we all scrubbed it, and when we had finished it looked a very great deal less forlorn. In fact it almost looked as though it might be a real camper van one day.

If we get some good weather we will paint it.

It will have to be soon, because there is only one week of school holiday left.

I am not thinking about it at all.