The picture is not the dogs. It is some peculiar livestock called alpacas, purchased by the newly-retired town people who have bought the cottage at the end of the farm drive. I have included it because I think they are quite the oddest looking versions of sheep that I have ever come across. Also I understand that they are very expensive indeed, so I hope that they are better at not dying than sheep seem to be.
The tiresome dogs spent all day yesterday fighting one another.
Roger Poopy has decided that he is an important dog and is having it explained to him by his father that he isn’t.
The fights are awful, with a terrific amount of snarling and tooth-baring and savagery, although so far nobody seems to have been seriously hurt.
The culmination came last night just as I was finishing writing to you. They were under my desk when suddenly they decided to murder one another in a hideous fur-tearing massacre of growls and claws and fury.
I was barefoot, which did not help my attempts to kick them apart. In the end Mark came and we grabbed them by the scruff of their necks and hurled them down the stairs to go and sit outside in the garden in the dark.
The were so scared of Mark being cross that they did not dare to come in, even though the doors were wide open, just sat there and whimpered occasionally in penitence.
We decided that this activity had got to be discouraged, because we were expecting my parents to visit today, and it is not wonderful to have conversations constantly interrupted by spatterings of dog blood and flying teeth. Mark told the dogs that they were wicked, and growled at them every time they even sniffed one another, until they were utterly intimidated, after which they hardly dared to voice even the smallest rumble of a snarl.
Their anxiety lasted all night and into today, so much so that when my parents and my aunt arrived we could not have had better behaved dogs, and my mother thought that I was being horrid to them every time I clipped one of them around the ear for just thinking about showing his teeth.
By tonight they had remembered that Mark and I were the biggest and scariest dogs in the house, and they have become perfect specimens of good-dogness, walking obediently to heel and lying down quietly when not required, and eating their dinner with impeccable good manners instead of frantically trying to shove one another away and wolf each other’s dinners. It is lovely to have such good dogs.
It was a lovely day, actually. We met up with my parents at the farm and gave them a guided tour of the camper van and the shed that we are not going to buy, and they made exactly all the right sort of sympathetic noises until we felt quite glowing with martyred virtue. Also they admired the camper van a great deal. This was splendid, because when you have been labouring boringly away at a project for almost eighteen months it is jolly important to have somebody tell you that you are very clever occasionally, and parents are the obvious volunteers for this.
We agreed with enthusiasm that we were very clever, and also brave in the face of adversity, and then they took us out to lunch to help bolster our weary spirits. This was also brilliant. We had crepes and wine and then Mark and I helped Oliver to eat his pizza, which is probably why he is so thin and we are not.
It is lovely to have a day where you completely relax and hardly do anything at all, which is what we did.
We sat in the garden afterwards and drank coffee, and listened to stories of their adventures as well as regaling them with stories of ours. For people in their eighties they seem to do rather well for having adventures, and I am endlessly impressed.
I was actually rather sorry when they had to go, because I would have liked to have heard more, but they wanted to get home, and in any case we would have to come in out of the garden because the skies had darkened with the promise of rain.
After they had gone we had the most colossal thunderstorm, splendid bolts of lightening and crashing thunder and absolutely torrential rain.
We discovered afterwards that we had forgotten to close the windows on the car.
Not to worry. We have got good dogs.
