At the risk of appearing boring, I expect you can hardly guess what I have been doing today.
I am now scratching my head frantically, trying to find something interesting to tell you about, so far without success. I do not think I can fill seven hundred words telling you about Symon the Black and the thoughtful musings of my day.
Really it is mostly what I have done. I made mayonnaise and took the dogs out, hung the washing up and tided up, got dinner ready and wrote my story, which is now far beyond being handed in for a three thousand word assessment, because already it is up to six thousand words. I am going to have to stop writing it soon and think about something else.
I am going to go to work next.
The dog-taking-out bit was probably one of the longest bits, so perhaps I had better tell you about that.
It occupied almost two hours because Roger Poopy’s father has become such an old gidget that we have got to spend quite a lot of time waiting for him. We have got no idea how old he is, except that he is at least fourteen, and probably closer to seventeen, and he does not like to charge about any more. I stride, Roger Poopy belts around, and he just potters, gently and easily, in his own time.
Today it was raining. I was not exactly having a lovely morning, high up on the fells in the gusting wind and the icy stabs of rain, and I got cross with him at one point. This was when I realised that he had not only slowed down and stopped, but actually ambled off in the wrong direction. I had to trail all the way back down the hill and shout him. Unsurprisingly he realised that he was in trouble then, and rushed off with an unexpected turn of speed, obviously still in the wrong direction.
He got lost then, and wandered about trying to work out where we had gone, and I had to pretend that I was not really cross and shout that he was a good dog to persuade him to come back, and continue ambling along at his infuriating snail-pace about thirty yards behind me.
I would be far more sympathetic if he was not more than able to charge around with Roger Poopy at high speed whenever he actually wants to, the problem is simply that he is not very interested in hiking up hills. What he likes to do is to tootle about, very slowly, investigating interesting patches of wee and sighing contentedly to himself.
Roger Poopy gets very bored with this.
I am mostly interested in going out for walks because of the good long think that I can have along the way, which is not helped by occasional bursts of frantic yelling, sometimes accompanied by jumping up and down and waving because the idiot can’t see us if he gets too far behind.
Roger Poopy has taken to rushing back after him and leaping on him with a series of loud barks and wrestling him to the ground. He does this five or six times on every walk, and it does not really help much, because as soon as his father sees him coming, he stops dead and braces himself for the incoming onslaught. I have some sympathy, because I am sure that I would not like to be wrestled into the mud half a dozen times every morning if I was an old age pensioner, but I can entirely understand where Roger Poopy is coming from.
Mark says that he is getting to the stage where we are going to have to leave him at home, but I do not want to do this. I think that he is not actually dead because he gets plenty of exercise, and it would be a backward step to let him stay at home snoring on his cushion, which is his very favourite thing.
He is doing exactly that as I write. He makes it his mission never to be far from my side, and every word of Symon the Black has been composed with the faint sound of dog-snores in the background.
I am going to work now.
I will have to be careful not to trip over him on the way out.
