A very nice German lady stopped us in the Library Gardens yesterday evening and told us how wonderful it was to see people who had their dogs under proper control instead of dragging them about on the ends of leads.
It is always nice to be admired, although in truth the dogs in question were not behaving themselves particularly well at all and had just been bellowed at in order to make them come to heel to cross the road instead of hanging about sniffing at interesting patches of wee on the corner of the gift shop.
Dogs doing what they are told is one of Mark’s pet Issues, because he knows that if a dog is on a lead you do not really have control of it. You have real control of your dog when you tell it to do something and it does that thing instead of whatever it was that it really wanted to do.
Ours are a bit rubbish at that.
I have to say that it is a very smug lovely feeling when you yell for them and they wheel round as one dog and come belting obediently towards you. This is more likely to happen if they know that you happen to have a bit of sausage in your pocket. They do, however, get selective deafness, usually if there is another dog in the area, especially one who might fancy either a fight or to have sex.
Also it doesn’t help if you get impatient and start becoming cross, because then they are quite sensible enough not to come anywhere near you. It is not at all easy to look at a dog who is charging about and behaving like a complete idiot on the other side of the grass and to call seductively that they are a good and lovely dog, and you would very much like them to join you. Reveal your true feelings and you won’t see them again until teatime.
Roger is being taught to sit and to jump at the moment. The result of this is that he knows when you have got a bit of sausage in your hand that he will be expected either to sit on the ground or to leap in the air in order to attain it. He hasn’t got the first idea which it ought to be, and hence whenever we start trying to teach him things he will randomly leap about and collapse on to the floor until he happens to chance on the action which coincides with the given instruction. This look ridiculous, not least because of his unabated enthusiasm no matter how many times he gets it wrong.
We took them with us this afternoon.
It was Number Two Daughter’s last rugby match and since we have never watched her playing rugby we thought we could be a bit late for work and pop along.
As it turned out we still haven’t seen her playing rugby, because we arrived halfway through, just after she was stretchered off the field with some unfortunate bashes to her head and suspected concussion.
We helped revive her with some cinnamon tea out of our flask and some cognac out of Mark’s hip flask, and of course she didn’t have concussion, but they wouldn’t let her go back on the field again anyway. We stayed and watched the rest of it, and the dogs charged about rolling in the muddy grass, until the final whistle blew and Mark explained to me who had won and how he knew.
It is a terribly rough game. They had to keep stopping whilst a medical person dashed on and off the field. Whilst we watched several more girls were carried off and dumped in the long grass at the edge of the pitch whilst the others carried on leaping on one another and throwing punches.
We buzzed off as they all limped back to the dressing room at the end, feeling rather glad that she had been sent off out of the middle of the carnage before any life-changing injuries had been inflicted. She is going off to Canada in a week and it would be terrible if something got snapped and she had to stay at home.
She didn’t, though, and everything is well. All she has got to do now is get through the post-match party this evening and we can breathe easily.
It is her last match party. I am very glad I am not going to attend.
I have seen them all playing out.
