The dogs have had itchy ears.
Roger Poopy does not do itchy ears in tranquil silence. He scratches at them with his back foot, all the while making any agonised half-bark-half-whining sound that could easily be recorded and sold as a sound effect for the Porn Hub website on the mighty Internet.
I would like to assure you that I have never actually visited the Porn Hub website, although not from any outburst of prudishness, but because I really don’t like to imagine the deluge of embarrassing junk mail that would cascade into my computer’s Inbox for ever afterwards. Hence I am speaking, you understand, from a conceptual point of view.
Roger Poopy’s satisfied scratching noises would fit in there very nicely.
They are, as perhaps you can imagine, an extremely irritating backdrop to a night’s sleep, and lead to sleepy bellows of For Goodness’ Sake Shut Up, Roger.
This seems vaguely unfair, given that he can hardly help having itchy ears, and we wondered if they were being caused by the flea that we discovered on Rosie last week.
We thought this was unlikely, given that the flea was most thoroughly vanquished, being squished, drowned and poisoned . No others have appeared since, and we have been looking very carefully, I can promise you.,
Then, to my surprise, my Facebook began to fill up with adverts saying: Are Your Dog’s Ears Itching?
We blamed Google for this. Google eavesdrops all the time, even when we turn him off. If we wanted to discuss starting a military insurrection, bombing the Houses of Parliament or even just saying that we didn’t believe in bat-flu, we would have to go and do it in the conservatory with the door shut. Google listens, tries to work out if we have got any cash to spend, and then rings all his friends to bombard us with advertisements. I think he also gets together with the government sometimes, and certainly has a hotline to the Chinese. You really can’t trust him at all.
Despite my irritation at this unwarranted interference, obviously I followed this thoughtful advice and looked to see what might be causing the itchy ears, and discovered that it was very probably a yeast infection.
Obviously they both have it. Rosie very generously licks Roger Poopy’s ears out for him sometimes. She is the only creature on the planet ever likely to volunteer for this task, if it were a choice between that and having my tongue cut out with the scissors I would still have to think very carefully. We gave their ears a good poke with some cotton buds and squeaked in horror at the hideous results.
We had to stop Rosie from trying to eat the cotton buds afterwards.
Yesterday we filled their ears with some Athlete’s Foot Cream, which has virtually identical ingredients to Dog Ear Cream but is fifteen quid cheaper. They appreciated this very much, and I am pleased to say that last night we slept for the entire night without once being woken by the sounds of ecstatic ear-riddling.
It was blissful.
In other news, we had two whole afternoons off yesterday and today. Mark is inventing something in his shed and I have been writing my story. I have dispatched it to a fellow student to read, and she sent me back a picture of her youthful daughter reading it as well, so perhaps it might be all right for children after all.
I do not exactly understand what Mark has been inventing, something to do with a swivel and a lever which he says will be too big to go in the house and will have to be wired up to an alternator in the front garden. I do not know what the National Park will have to say about this, but frankly it couldn’t be much worse than the mess currently in the front garden, which we are going to dismantle and rebuild some time when we are doing nothing this spring.
I am sure it will be fine.
On the taxi rank tonight. This weekend I have been obliged to agree that the weather is awful probably about a hundred and fifty times, and am going to start pretending to be deaf again soon.
I am not feeling very sociable.
