Lap of the Gods

It was supposed to be a day off, but it has turned out to be unexpectedly difficult.

It started off all very nicely, apart from a mild feeling of fragility caused by having had such a lovely wine-soaked happy evening with Number Two Daughter last night. This did not lead to a hangover, although I thought guiltily that I deserved one, but I must confess that I was not at my energetic finest.

Number Two Daughter disappeared quite quickly this morning having made arrangements to spend the day walking with her friend, and we took the dogs off to amble around the park, only to come back to a leaking pipe at the bottom of the stairs.

It had not been leaking when we set off. It was a new, surprise leak, presumably caused by the Gods fiddling about with the plumbing in our absence, probably in search of amusement to enliven a dull Tuesday morning.

Mark said it was a joint that he had re-used from something else and probably needed a new rubber seal. He turned the water off upstairs and asked me to hold a bucket under the pipes whilst he disconnected the joint so they could drain out.

The pipes, I should add, were above my head.

For the clearest possible picture of what happened next, think of the word Deluge. Or possibly Torrent.

Even Very Wet Indeed would do.

By the time he realised that the water had not been properly turned off we were both soaked to the skin, had a small flood at the bottom of the stairs, had filled the bucket three times and had fused all of the electricity where the massive watery cascade had encountered a plug socket.

It was not our finest hour.

He turned the water off again, emptied the pipe and changed the seal, which took about fifteen seconds.

The clearing up took a lot longer than that.

We had only just finished the clearing up when the next thing happened. This was not funny, but terribly sad.

Actually, the water wasn’t very funny either, certainly not whilst it was happening.

The terribly sad thing was the arrival of a lady we knew with a little dog. She had inherited the little dog from somebody who had loved it very much, but lost her marbles and then died. The dog had been very sad but worse, was in a terrible state.

It was the sort of dog like ours which has long hair, only nobody had been cutting its hair and it had grown into its eyes.

Its eyes were so encrusted with horrible green stuff that they had stuck shut. We could not find its eyes underneath the dreadful matted lumps of stinking, infected pus that had clogged around them.

The lady said that we had to be careful because the dog was very grumpy.

We said that we were not surprised.

We got out the dog clippers and Mark held the dog whilst I gave it a complete haircut.

We shaved all the hair from its face and cleaned its poor sore eyes.

Imagine how much it hurts to have something in your eyes. The poor dog had been like that for weeks and weeks, and worse, it had practically become blind due to the pain and the infections.

We shaved it until it was completely bald. It had several weeping sores.

It was very frightened and upset, and bit me once when I accidentally poked a sore bit, but on the whole it was far better behaved than our dogs usually are, and we thought that it was just relieved to feel itself freed from the horrible,  filthy, matted hair.

It cheered up enormously when we had finished. I took it upstairs and shoved it in the bath whilst Mark cleared up the disgusting pus-encrusted fur. I washed all of its sores and hosed away the last of the scabs, and it fought just like dogs usually fight in the bath, so I got soaked to the skin for a second time.

When we had finished I rubbed some warm olive oil into its wax-filled ears, and massaged them until they felt better, and rubbed Germolene in to the sores, and actually when we had finished it was bouncing about just like our own dogs, although it did not seem to have any muscles, and could jolly well do with some decent exercise.

Our dogs were so relieved to discover that they were not going to be shaved as well they forgot to growl and bounced about happily with it, and when the lady came back to get it, she was very pleased.

It upset me whenever I thought about it for all the rest of the day. It must have taken months for it to get into that state, and nobody had done anything to help it.

After that I cleaned one of the cupboards and the oven, which was just as disgusting, if it had been a dog somebody would have called the RSPCA. I am working my way through the kitchen cleaning it a bit at a time, by Christmas I will have a clean one.

We went to work after that but Mark’s taxi has broken so he has gone home. It is blowing out clouds of blue smoke and he says it is the Turbo.

Hurrah for the Gods.

Ah well.