Give them to your sons

For some reason today I have found myself profoundly weary.

There is no reason at all for this that I can see, because I have hardly been doing anything at all.

All the same, everything on my Job List today seemed to prove just too difficult, and I have not done almost all of it. I was supposed to make shortbread and buy some more butter and put the sheets back on Lucy’s bed now that Oliver’s friend has buzzed off.

It just seemed too exhausting, so I didn’t.

I did manage to empty the dogs, including the visiting one, which distinguished itself by biting Mark this morning. It realised that this was something of a faux-pas the second that it had done it, and promptly expressed its anxiety by having a wee under the table. This did nothing to increase its popularity.

It bit Mark because he was trying to persuade it to come out from underneath the table to have its sore eyes filled with cream, and it thought it would prefer to stay where it was. It had to be dragged out then, through all of its own wee, and wrestled into submission for the cream, which meant some considerable mopping up and Mark had to change his trousers before he could go to work.

I had to bath the dog as well, once Mark had gone, not to mention launder its bed and blankets again, because it had tried to hide in its basket, which promptly, revoltingly, became flavoured with odour of panic-stricken dog wee.

This was not the finest start to the day.

Still, we are not without a silver lining.  Roger and Rosie have been so horrified by the general bawling and dog-related violence that they have been endlessly determined to demonstrate what wonderfully well-behaved dogs they are. They have been pristine models of canine virtue for the last week. They will come to heel at the faintest word, and would not even begin to consider the wickedness of having an accident anywhere. They are the Good Dogs.

After I had finished faffing about with the dogs I took Oliver to work. He has recommenced working at the pub in the village, but instead of being a kitchen pot-washer and general dogsbody, he has begun to climb the slippery Hospitality ladder and has been promoted to its next, giddying rung. He is now a waiter.

A career in the restaurant industry is practically within his grasp.

He is not yet old enough to work behind the bar, but they have promised that they will teach him to do that as well once he comes of age, it seems that the sky is the limit.

Personally I think I might prefer to be washing pots rather than talking to the general village clientele of drunk halfwits, but I think I might have become jaded with my years of customer-service experience, which has not turned out to be my forte in the least, as regular readers will recall.

Oliver does not seem to have minded very much, and says that he thinks he likes it. I am not sure how much I will like it, because he now has to wear uniform shirts, which have got to be ironed. He ironed his own today at work, because it was terribly crumpled when they gave it to him, and they didn’t have an ironing board so he had to iron it on top of the washing machine, but I do not imagine that there is likely to be a repeat performance.

I have got a huge pile of ironing waiting for me anyway. Perhaps it is time I did something about it.

Maybe tomorrow, after making shortbread and putting the sheets on the bed.

I had ethical hot cross buns for breakfast. They were a flavour called called St. Clements, which turned out, you might not be surprised to discover, was Oranges and Lemons.

I thought this was pleasingly inspired.

All the same, they didn’t manage to stick with the nursery-rhyme theme

They most certainly weren’t called Two A Penny.