Ask a policeman

I am getting fed up of the adverts. If I can’t get them to stay in the sidebar they are going to have to go. With any luck they will have gone by the time you get to this. in the meantime, I apologise. They are horrible.

Having said that, it is not looking likely. If I get anything at all written at all on these pages tonight I will be doing jolly well.

It is bank holiday weekend, and the sun is shining. The Lake District is bursting with people. I have been at work for ages and I have only just stopped for long enough to write this.

We were late for work, mostly because we have been trying to cram too many things into the day. Much of it has been taken up looking for Roger Poopy, who has inexplicably disappeared.

We do not have the first idea what has happened to him.

It was very hot when we got up, because obviously it was lunchtime by then, and the sun had got well into its stride, so we opened the front door. We often do this, and on the whole the dogs do not ever bother about it, but today Roger Poopy disappeared through it.

We know he did this because he is not in the house and the back gate was closed.

We have not got the smallest idea where he might be. Nobody has called to say they have found him.

We thought that probably he went out of the garden gate because there was an interesting dog in the road. The troubling thing is that it is quite possible that whilst he was milling about right outside the gate, somebody helpful has thought that he is a stray dog and taken him miles away by means of rescuing him.

I do hope not. Roger Poopy is perfectly capable of finding his own way home. It is night time now, and he is not back. He must be feeling very lonely and worried by now. Certainly I am worried, and even missing him, in the sense that even though I am at work, I know he is not at home making the living room smell awful. This is an unhappy thought. He is a tiresome nuisance but we like him.

Even his father, who has almost nothing to do with him except to growl at him several times a day, in between long periods of pointedly ignoring him, is beside himself with distress. There is nobody nipping his ears or trying to steal his bit of sausage or irritatingly sucking his fur. Much to his astonishment, he has discovered that he is sad about this.

I hope he has not attacked a spaniel and been arrested.

In between fruitlessly wandering about Windermere, hunting for Roger Poopy, we have, as usual, been busy.

I was still putting name labels on school uniform. Mark has been sitting at the table, wearing his strongest pair of glasses and scowling. He was dismantling several old iPhones to see if he could use all the bits to make himself one whole iPhone which would actually work.

His own phone has stopped working several weeks ago, and he has been borrowing Oliver’s as an emergency substitute. Clearly this state of affairs cannot carry on, as Oliver is leaving for the Scottish wilderness soon, when I expect that he is going to want custody of his own communication devices.

Hence Mark has been puzzling over a solution ever since. He does not know very much about the inside of telephones, but he is eternally optimistic about such mysteries, and so spent this afternoon faffing about with screws so tiny as to be almost invisible, and swearing. The finished result is now on charge at home. It did not want to be charged at all before, so already we have some improvement, which I think is a jolly good start.

I will let you know tomorrow if it works.

LATER NOTE. 02:00 am.

We are a two-dog household again.

I had a taxi full of customers when I came through Windermere and saw a police van next to the camper van, and two policemen trying to crawl underneath it with flashlights.

It is not difficult to work out the rest of the story. As the song goes, lost dogs, thick fogs, don’t know what to do…

He had been hiding under the camper van, but had growled and run off at the approach of the police. I dropped my customers off and then came rushing back.

I went into the Library Gardens and shouted him. He did not shout back, and so after a little while I gave up. I had just driven as far as the end of the road when there was a thump, which turned out to be a desperate lost dog taking a flying leap at the driver’s window before I went away again and he was abandoned for ever.

To say that he was relieved and pleased to be found is an understatement. He was so thrilled that he leaked a bit, how delighted I was.

I took him home, where his father was not at all pleased to see him.

I am, though.