Rosie is in season and the tiresome dogs are being a complete nuisance.
Roger Poopy loves her passionately. I am heartily wishing that we had called him something else, because bellowing his name across the park causes everybody to look round, and it now looks as though I am giving him an instruction.
I have gone off them both.
There are no longer any quiet moments. All moments now have a background soundtrack of dog-heavy breathing, accompanied by little yelps, and followed by the sound of me bawling.
I would shut them in the yard if I wasn’t going to work.
I had a small adventure when I took them out this morning. I was almost at the park when I heard a knocking noise, and after a moment, realised it was coming from one of the cottages just at the side of the road. You have got to go down some steps to get to them, like our house they are built under the ground. A man was standing inside his house, banging on the front door and waving at me through the window.
He was also somewhat cross-eyed, and was sticking his tongue out, reminding me rather of Roger Poopy in some of his more exuberant moments.
This was not an inspiring vision, especially since he was staring at me through the window and beckoning frantically.
Obviously under those circumstances the sensible thing to do is to run away, but obviously I didn’t. A man was walking past on the other side of the road, so I called to him, and explained that the chap in the cottage seemed to need help.
E’s a nutter, said the passer-by, walking on unperturbed. Just ignore him.
This seemed a remarkably unhelpful response, so I dismissed him and crept, uncertainly, down the steps, to see whether, once I was invisible from the road, I was going to be kidnapped, assaulted and brutally murdered by the nutter, or if there was a problem with which I might be able to help.
He was gesturing frantically at the place where the door handle would have been had there been one, which there wasn’t, and shouting Please. Please.
It took me a while to realise that the door was stuck shut, and he couldn’t get out.
This is not an uncommon problem in Windermere during the monsoon season. Front doors swell up with the massive quantity of water they are preventing from ingress into the house. Our front door regularly sticks shut and we have to ask the postman to pass parcels in through the bedroom window.
I hurled my weight against it from the outside, and he tugged from the inside, and eventually we released him.
He turned out to be a foreign variety of nutter. who spoke very little English, but was very grateful all the same, and we both laughed. I buzzed off hastily before he could murder me anyway, because you never know.
I am very glad we also have a back door. How terrible if we didn’t.
In other news, I am pleased to announce that Cambridge has sent me my results for a recent test that they ran. It is called Autism screening, and you have got to score twenty six to pass. I have aced that with an overall score of forty one. The top mark possible was fifty. I knew I had passed because the examiner told me so at the time, even before she had added the marks up. This is brilliant because it means I am now allowed to ask for the horrible neon lights to be switched off in lectures, not that we have got many more lectures now.
I have got a lecture on Wednesday and I have got loads of stuff to do before it starts, so I have rushed through all of the housework today so that tomorrow I can concentrate on writing things and Thinking Hard. I am looking forward to that very much indeed.
I am going to have a whole day of thinking about writing things.
It will be splendid.
