It has rained so hard here today that water is a foot deep on the roads in some places and some roads are closed.
I can hardly believe the helpfulness of the Weather Gods during our holiday last week: what an absolutely magnificent piece of good fortune we have had. There have been three nice days this month, and we spent them all playing on the beach, we have been beyond lucky. I am very grateful indeed. The Weather Gods might have an overdeveloped sense of humour when it comes to hanging out the washing, but we thought that we ought to light an appreciative candle for their generosity when the chips were down.
We splashed around the shops in the village this morning, replenishing the poor depleted fridge, after which we had to put our hats and coats to dry in front of the still-lit fire.
We had lots of horrible washing to be done, gritty with sand and smelling of stale seawater. When each load finished we had to hang it to dry all over the house, which was a weary business, pushing through limp washing dangling everywhere, warm and damp and humid. In the end we opened the windows despite the pounding rain, and Mark brought the dehumidifier downstairs again, which helped a lot.
I cooked sausages and a couple of chickens and made pancakes for the children, until life felt better again, and we had a house meeting over coffee to discuss the prospects for the poopies.
They have now all found homes, every single one, and my phone still buzzes a couple of times a day with hopeful enquiries. The only remaining issue is which poopy to leave with Number One Daughter.
She has, of course, fallen in love with Fat White, which we had thought would stay with us. I had hoped she would love a small brown poopy called, for some reason I have forgotten, Roger, and which has remained steadfastly un-chosen by anybody.
Of course part of the reason that Fat White was the most appealing was because we have all played with him that little bit more, and he was bursting with poopy-confidence and the joyous certainty of his own lovableness. We considered this and then realised that Roger has probably not grown much in appeal to anybody because he is boringly brown all over, and because of this accident of birth he has been left almost entirely to his own devices.
We resolved that we would address this straight away, and then it would not matter what Number One Daughter thought. If she loved Fat White we would keep a brown poopy that we all loved, and if it turned out that she didn’t want Fat White then she could want a small brown poopy who was just as loveable.
We spent the rest of the day making an extra fuss of Roger, who after an initial resistance suddenly realised that he enjoyed it very much.
He even went on the walk around the Library Gardens, and carefully copied everything his father did, going for a wee in all of the same places, and trotting behind him with his little tail proudly curled in happiness.
By the end of the day, Roger had become the cheeriest little dog you can imagine, what an amazing difference. From being a quiet poopy hiding at the back of the riot, he has suddenly started to bounce: and of course because we have all made a fuss of him, we have all started to love him after all.
Number Two Daughter says she thinks she would like to keep him. Mark says he is a bright little dog and will be easy to train because he is so very eager to please. I think he is rather like an animate teddy bear, with his serious little brown face and black button-eyes, and I am trying very hard indeed not to yearn secretly for Fat White.
They are all so very lovely, having a house full of poopies has been such an extraordinarily happy time. I shall miss them all terribly when they go: but they are all going to the nicest of homes. Better still, not a single one is going to be an only dog, so I don’t have to worry at all that any one of them will finish up alone and crying in the night. They will all be warm and loved and get a good chance at the world.
I think I need to light a candle to the Gods of Small Poopy Protection as well.
