Undogtored

I have had a request not to tell you any more about the poor passionate-but-thwarted dogs.

I am pretending to be considerately going along with this but actually there isn’t much more to tell anyway. Mr. Arranged Marriage dog has gone home, and Roger hardly wants to do anything rascally to Rosie at all any more, so it has metamorphosised into a fairly dull story, like more or less anything you might read on the pages of the Westmorland Gazette. I found the Liverpool Echo online the other day, which makes for a far more astonishing read. People in Liverpool are biffing one another and smuggling drugs in their knickers, it would appear. The prime-position headlines in today’s online Westmorland Gazette told me that it is going to be windy on Friday, and that there will be a branch of Starbucks opening in Ulverston one day, but that the actual date is being kept as a surprise, in order to prolong the excitement, like putting up your Christmas tree in November.

There were two articles about Starbucks arriving, so it must be important.

Perhaps I ought to write to them about the dogs.

I mean the Westmorland Gazette, not Starbucks, obviously.

It did not even mention the unexpected departure of Nicola Sturgeon. I am not sorry that she has gone, except that probably we will never find out now if my hairdresser was right about her wearing a wig.

I rang the Gas Board again this morning, yet again, about the two hundred quid they still owe us. They told me that the cheque was in the post, and promised to call me back within two hours, which they didn’t. I can’t say that I was surprised about this. I wish it was possible to write menacing letters promising disconnection the other way round.

I can’t even threaten to take my account elsewhere, because I did that ages ago.

Actually I think I shall miss them when they finally pay us and I don’t have to sit with my feet up on the desk for a couple of hours every few days, answering my emails and flicking idly through the august Daily Telegraph whilst listening to their irritating queue music. It is quite a welcome break in the day, and involves both Being Busy and Doing Nothing, the juxtaposition of both activities meaning that I don’t have a single thing to feel guilty about.

Once I had given up on the Gas Board I returned my weary footsteps to the still-ongoing process of restoring our lives back to normal after my brief sojourn in academia. Mark has been so busy he has hardly had chance to do anything, and so when I had finished cooking things, the conservatory had to be watered and there was a pile of old pallets which needed to be sawn into firewood. Mark had already bashed them apart, leaving me to carry out the actual dismemberment with the terrifying chop saw.

I will spare your anxieties and tell you that I still have all of my fingers, partly because I am so terrified of its malicious whine that I am standing as far back as I can, operating it at arms length with my eyes shut. Every now and again it rejects a piece of wood and bashes it backwards into my fingers, just to make sure I am paying attention.

We have very nearly run out of firewood at the moment, which is going to become a challenge soon. The man at the builders’ yard seems to be on holiday, so our supply from there has temporarily dried up, and so in a very few days we will have to go back to the farm to collect some more from our fast-dwindling winter stores. Mark usually does this because his taxi is already such a disgraceful mess that it doesn’t make any difference, but if he has got to go to work for the rest of the week then I will probably have to go over in mine.

What fun I will have hoovering it out afterwards. I can hardly contain my excitement. I expect you are looking forward to that day with bated breath.

Maybe tomorrow.

Or maybe not.