Unappreciated

This heat is wonderful.

I am brim-full of Vitamin D and considering storing some in the bedding box along with the extra shampoo for the hard times of winter.

The sheets and towels are all clean and dried to a crisp in the garden, and the black currant bush is dripping with fat purple berries and the front garden is full of tiny strawberries. Another few days and we will have jam.

We were a bit late starting today, and so I did not go for a run. It is not nice to try and run up a mountain in baking heat, and I am always mindful of the poor SAS men who died in their training due to too much exertion on hot days. One cannot be too careful.

Instead I braved the most horrible of tasks.

I shaved the poor boiling dogs.

They have been staggering about miserably with their tongues hanging out for a few weeks now. It is of course shearing season in the rural calendar, and since I do not have any sheep at the moment I thought that I would practice on the dogs.

We went into the garden and I spread out an old quilt cover. This turned out to be a mistake. It was relatively easy to hoover the lawn but the quilt cover was impossible to get clean and had to be put on the compost heap afterwards.

The dogs did not like having their hair cut, and expressed their opinion continually whilst I was doing it. I had to take turns with them and do a bit of one, then a bit of the other, and then back to the first one again. Roger Poopy wagged about determinedly and I had to sit on him for one bit. When it was not his turn he would not go away, but hovered about trying to mount his father whilst he was being clipped, which made his father snarl furiously. I flapped at him to try and make him buzz off, which did not help the smooth finish of his father’s haircut.

I bet my own hairdresser never has these problems. I bet he has never had to try and stop one customer doing sex with another at the crucial moment in order to get a nice tidy finish around the ears.

Eventually they were done, that is to say, mostly done, because their claws still need clipping and the hair around their paws still needs to be trimmed, but we had all had enough.

The nice thing about being a dog is that after your haircut you can slope off and loaf about on the sofa feeling lightweight and refreshed. I am not a dog, and I had got to hoover the lawn, which went rather better than you might expect.

I itched terribly, and my clothes were horribly covered in dog hair, not the sort that you might brush off easily, but the sort that has burrowed itself into the weave of the fabric and needs to be painstakingly plucked out. I looked like a werewolf might at the approach of the full moon.

I had a shower, and then set about trying to get my clothes clean. This was awful, and involved brushing them and flapping them and bashing them, and then I had to wash the clothes brush.

In the end I put them through the washing machine twice, which seemed to work, in that afterwards there was dog hair on all of the washing and not much on the recently-hairy garments themselves.

The dogs were terribly sorry for themselves, which I thought was a bit ungrateful, given that it had taken ages and now they would be cool, and after all I had hardly cut their ears at all. They are completely bald now, and will be fine until they get sunburned.

If only they appreciated my efforts on their behalf.

What rascals they are.