It has turned into a very sad day.
I do not know which bits are the more awful in their awfulness.
To begin at the beginning, we have become a two-dog family.
Riley, Roger Poopy’s tiresome and seemingly immortal father has finally gone through the long-awaited Grim Door to meet his maker.
I am very sad. He was my dog, forever under my feet, my companion during the chilly camper-van nights in Cambridge, sharer of my cheese on toast, my armchair, and my life. He was grumpy, solitary and anarchic with an attitude problem entirely inappropriate in one of his diminished stature, but I loved him, and I shall miss him very much.
He has been tottering and incontinent for ages, and at least I can be glad he is not suffering now. Mark buried him at the farm this afternoon and we are going to plant a tree on him, although I don’t know what sort yet, something gnarled with a lot of thorns would probably be most appropriate.
The other dogs are grief-stricken, he has been there for all of Roger Poopy’s life, and he has left a gaping, dog-shaped parental hole. Both of them are lying sadly in front of the fire, refusing to lift their heads, and not even interested in chocolate. He was a truly terrible father, if he had been a person he would quite rightly have been arrested and locked up, but Roger Poopy loved him.
He had a good innings.
The second thing has been a small domestic disaster upsetting nobody except me.
I have got to get my assignment handed in before weekend. We have been frantically busy in the run up to Christmas, and I had set this week aside for its completion. This has not been an easy project, because I still have to go to work, and of course there is still laundry to be done, and a family to be fed. Still I knew that probably if Mark shared some domesticity, in between preparing the camper van for its MOT, probably I could get it done, and I have been longing for this golden moment far more than I cared about any of the Christmas activities. This was to be my time, my space for concentrating on glorious academia, for reading, writing and thinking, and really being a student.
I have written the first of the pieces, and now embarked on the far harder, complex, academic analytical piece. It needs a very lot of research and thought.
It is very difficult and time consuming.
This morning I discovered that Mark has invited some distant relatives from New Zealand, whom I have never met, to come and stay with us.
They arrive tomorrow.
They have to be housed and fed.
They will have to go in Lucy’s room, which of course she has only just vacated. The bathroom has to be cleaned, the sheets washed, and a celebratory at-least-two-course dinner with relaxing drinks prepared, followed by breakfast and coffee and sociable chatting plus a great deal of clearing up. They will need to be entertained, they are on holiday so they will go to bed late, and they will probably want to be taken to visit the interesting lake at the bottom of the hill. After that the bedroom will need to be stripped out and cleaned again, because Lucy comes back at weekend.
Right at this moment all I can say is that it is probably just as well that there is no more room in Riley’s hole.
I am very upset indeed.
Obviously I should not be, because Mark goes to all sorts of trouble to accommodate all of my countless relatives. He is patient and undemanding, accepting and reasonable at all times.
Nevertheless, this afternoon I would like it on record that I could cheerfully have clubbed him to death with my laptop.
The story gets worse.
I spent this morning labouring on the essay. I compiled a detailed list of papers that I needed to cite, selected a dozen quotations, and wrote several hundred words.
It was lashing down with rain. Mark’s shed leaked. The plug socket flooded with water and the electricity went off.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, the computer went black.
Every single word I had written was lost for ever. Every citation, every carefully-constructed sentence, everything gone. Every record of the papers I had read, every careful explanation of books and publishers and authors disappeared into the icy eternity of cyber-space.
Mark says he will be helpful tomorrow, maybe he will take Oliver to the dentist or something, but frankly, he might have met with a laptop-related misfortune by then.
I suppose things can only get better.
