I had an email from Google this morning informing me that one of the top phrases keyed into their search engine to lead people to this site was: ‘naked clog dancing’.
No wonder I have been hacked.
I tried it myself, obviously, and it didn’t work, so don’t you bother. You will only fill your computer with automatically generated suggestions encouraging you to visit Porn hub.
I do not know where Google gets this stuff from, nor, now I come to think of it, what sort of person might be Googling naked clog dancing in the first place.
I had to make quite a deliberate attempt to think about something else.
In fact I have had a day of doing computer things, as well as looking up naked clog dancers. I do hope that it never occurs to Mark to look at my browsing history. He does not read these pages, and I will probably forget to mention it. It would be awful if he stumbled across it as a surprise.
Apart from upsetting my far-too-vivid imagination, I have been setting our lives in order.
I have been doing sums and sending invoices and paying bills and chewing my fingernails. This was a good thing to be doing, paying bills, not chewing my fingernails, obviously, because the August weather in the Lake District is simply too vile for words. Rain has lashed down all day, and everywhere is slate-grey and grim and peopled with miserable tourists, thinking longingly of Sangria, and wondering if perhaps a two-week prison sentence might be worth it after all.
I have lit the fire, by way of some good cheer, and also because of wanting to dry things. Mostly I wanted to dry the washing, but there was also my boots, sodden from the dog emptying, which had to be propped on the rack where they steamed, drearily, all day.
The dogs were thoroughly empty, because Roger Poopy’s father was sick again this morning. I imagine it was him, because he looked guilty, and Roger Poopy, for almost the first time in his rascally little life, did not.
He is not very well.
I had hoped to have some sleep this afternoon before work, because I did not get into bed until long, long after midnight, and then nobly got up again shortly afterwards, to make breakfast and packed lunches for Mark and Oliver.
I drew the curtains and got into bed having set the alarm for an hour’s time, because of having had too many things to do for the time at my disposal.
During that hour the telephone rang twice, a man from Amazon came to make a delivery, and then the dog decided to be not very well at all and lay next to the bed whimpering.
I got up and gave him a pain killer. It should have worked, because it was strong enough to have felled a baby elephant, but he was still very sorry for himself, and a couple of hours later was sitting on the stairs, still making little whimpery noises.
I inspected him fairly thoroughly, and apart from a shockingly horrible smell, which is fairly usual for him, could not discern any evident deterioration. He has got thinner lately, and he is grumpy and bad-tempered, although again, this is not out of the ordinary. He loathes children and people who want to stroke him, and other dogs who want to play with him, and people walking past him. I would consider this a fairly normal function of being elderly, if he had not always been like that.
He is very elderly. We do not know quite how elderly, because he did not start his life with us. He started life with a family who thought that they would prefer a less growly sort of dog, the sort that liked them and was pleased to see them sometimes, so we finished up with him, and frankly, I rather like him like that. It is like having a small manifestation of my inner feelings.
I left him asleep on his cushion in front of the fire. Mark had a look at him when he got home, and says that he thinks he is going to die, probably not this week, but he might be on That Road, and we need to keep an eye on his progress.
I am not surprised by this, although saddened. I shall call the vet and persuade him to issue some more pain killers, so that we can ease his last weeks out peacefully.
We can feed him on chocolate and bits of cheese and all of the things that he likes best.
He can have a happy ending.
