Bald and books

At the time of writing I have given a haircut to one and a half dogs.

The battery on the clippers went flat and the spare battery turned out not to be working, to my extreme irritation.

I thought that I would write to you and then go back and finish the Incompletely Bald Dog.

The successfully-balded dog, being Roger Poopy, is feeling very sorry for himself, whilst his father, who had an unexpected reprieve, is being chirpily smug, and is going to have a nasty surprise in the very near future.

Even from my limited haircutting so far I can tell you that it was long overdue. Roger Poopy resembled nothing so much as a hearthrug that has been thoughtfully laid down on the road between Russia and Ukraine, as an offer of welcome for President Putin’s tank battalion.

He was horrid. Had he been said hearthrug he would very probably have put President Putin off, or at the very least inclined him to step gingerly around him.

It is not easy to give a haircut to somebody who is trying very hard to curl up into as small a shape as possible, whilst continually explaining their feelings by means of a low, rumbling growl. Every time I tugged a paw free, it sprang back, like an elastic band on the end of a horrid child’s ruler.

Haircut The Sequel is going to follow in a minute.

It has not helped with my progress along the day. Mark came home yesterday, surveyed my culinary activities, and said: Goodness, rum for dinner again, then, and I am sorry to say that today has not been much of an improvement. I have made fudge, which has turned out unexpectedly well, and some pistachio and vanilla flavoured chocolate, because we are going to want food to keep us awake in the middle of the night over the weekend whilst we are engaged in taxi-driving, but I have not yet got around to any actual dinner.

It might turn out to be rum again.

Apart from that we walked up over the fell this morning, which went rather better than the previous few days, except that the Weather Gods must have spotted us getting to the top, and the heavens absolutely opened when we got there. I mean really opened, with stinging rain and hailstones, and an unexpected howling gale.

We all rushed back down to Windermere as quickly as we could, where it was hardly raining at all. There is a particularly bleak moment on any wet walk where one is about twenty minutes away from home, with water dripping from one’s eyelashes and dribbling in a small but persistent stream down the back of one’s neck. That is a dark moment of knowing perfectly well that one is sodden and miserable, and no end is in sight for ages.

I know twenty minutes is not ages but it jolly well feels like it when water is even squelching upwards into one’s armpits.

That was this morning, and my coat is still dripping.

Once I had dried I had a moment of inspiration, and went to the library.

Regular readers will recall that I used to visit the library all the time, but stopped when they started demanding papers at the door, and insisting that I left a phone number so that I could be put under house arrest for ten days simply because some other idiot who had been in the library on that day had developed a cough.

Given that such a random cessation of income would have been a disaster I stopped going.

I went today, and there was no longer an official at the door, which was nice, but somehow half of the books seem to have disappeared in the time I was away. It is so long since I have been there that I picked out half a dozen and when I got to the desk discovered that I had already read every single one of them, so they can’t have been very memorable.

I had another go with rather more success, but the library has been re-vamped and I don’t like it. There are lots more easy chairs and little tables with dull leaflets issued by the council strategically laid across them, presumably this is so they can’t be accused of never telling us anything.

There are not nearly as many books. I have got more books than they have, which is a wearisome discovery, and they did not have a single one of the books I had hoped to encounter.

Not to worry. Sooner or later I am sure I could develop a taste for Westerns and historical novels with pictures of ladies in crinolines staring hopefully out of windows.

I have got some new books to read now, which will  occupy the dull moments on the taxi rank.

You can never have too many books.