Vetting

I have rushed about all day and am now very glad of the peace and undisturbed quiet of the taxi rank.

Poor Mark is still lying in the alley underneath his taxi trying to bash it back together. It is being a very long job.

He has got to finish it today because of going back to work tomorrow, so it might turn into the sort of thing that is still going on at midnight. I am very sympathetic but can’t do much to help, so I have fed him on sausages and pie and made admiring noises instead.

I have been making pies. I have been trying to fill up the fridge before the bank holiday weekend, and I have made beef burgers and Chinese chicken, biscuits and cheese and onion pies. Another day of it tomorrow and we will be ready for lift-off.

There is never time to do very much when we have got tourists. Do not expect pages of deathless prose here either, I am very much hoping that I will be far too busy even to knit. I need to get on with my knitting. It has taken me months and months and I have not even got to the sleeves yet. This is because I keep making colossal howlers and having to unravel bits and start again. I am telling myself that this is because I am trying to knit in the dark but really it is because I am rubbish. I discovered yesterday that the back and the front are different lengths, but I am just going to carry on and pretend it was meant to be like that.

I would like to finish it before I go back to Cambridge next time. This is because I have got one decent jersey, which was knitted for me by Mrs. Number Two Daughter. I have also got some sweatshirts which I wear all the time, but I can’t wear them to go to Cambridge because they say Cambridge University on them, and Cambridge University is the one place at which it is truly uncool to wear them. They are suitable only for the taxi rank.

Did I mention I was doing a Master’s’s’ degree at Cambridge University? Well I am.

I took the visiting dog for its appointment at the vet this afternoon, because the vet refused to issue eye-cream for it without a consultation. Its owners agreed to fund this and so I hiked off with it after the pies were done.

I was entirely unimpressed.

The vet stood over on the other side of the room. This was because she had met the dog before.

I explained that he was a newly-reformed character and poked my finger into his mouth just to illustrate the point, but she was not convinced. She said that last time he made so much fuss that they could not even get him into the surgery and she had to look at him in the waiting room.

I made him sit down on the table and behave perfectly, and eventually the vet agreed to come and stand near the table. I held his mouth closed but she still would not actually touch him, even though he was trying really, really hard to be a Good Dog.

She said that it was an astonishing difference.

I agreed but privately thought that she was an idiot. It is a small dog, not an alligator.

I explained that he had been having some difficulties and she agreed that he was in pain almost all the time, and gave me some ear drops with anaesthetic in them. She wondered if I would manage to give them to him so I stuck my finger in his ear to demonstrate that I could, and she marvelled at my dog whispery skills, about which I did not enlighten her.

He is trying very hard indeed to be a Good Dog now. He comes to be with us when he realises that we have abandoned him asleep in his basket, and likes to have his neck massaged because he is arthritic and doddery.

Have a picture. This dog frightened the vet so much that she would not even come near the table.

He has a Kray Twin sort of look in his eye even now.

I still don’t know what we are going to do when his owners come back.