I have had a bit of a hasty flap today.
I had lots of things to be done and not really enough day to do them all. Apart from everything else it is Clean Sheets Day, and so I had to rush out of bed in a hurry in order to shove them into the washing machine as soon as I could so that they could be pegged on the line and flap until they were dry, preferably before bedtime. Afterwards is not the happiest end to the day.
My Big Project was to give the dogs a haircut. I have changed my computer password to SmellyDogs, because it is difficult to forget it, especially when they are lying next to me.
Roger Wicked Poopy had been rolling in something ghastly again, probably fox poo, which is what it smelled like. It had crusted all over his shoulders and the back of his head and he had been trotting about bursting with satisfied pride at his own smartness, rather like one of the taxi drivers who bought a convincing copy of a Rolex watch, at least until it stopped a week or two later.
We are going to go south tomorrow to visit my father in prison hospital again, and I was not in the least looking forward to a journey which involved sharing a confined space with him. I mean with Roger Poopy, obviously, not my father, and so today had got to be Haircut Day.
I am going for a haircut myself tomorrow. I can only hope the hairdresser does not feel the need to employ the same elbow-in-the-throat technique to which I was forced to resort today, although mostly that was Rosie. Roger Poopy closed his eyes, went very limp and pretended to be dead, presumably working on the assumption that I would not bother to shave a dead dog, and the occasional woebegone groan was the only sign that life was still progressing.
Tiresomely it took ages, because the clippers kept going flat. The last thing I had done with them was to shave Mark’s head before he buzzed off to sea, and I had forgotten to plug them in on charge. I got Roger Poopy’s paws and one ear done before they juddered to a halt and I had to desist. Roger seized the opportunity to make himself scarce, and dashed upstairs to hide, leaving little piles of dog hair on every step in his wake.
I gave up for a while, and went into the kitchen to make pancakes for my taxi picnics for the week, which I did until I judged the clippers to be sufficiently revived and the reprieve to be over. Roger Poopy had to be dragged back again, his paws braced against the carpet, practically smoking in his determination to remain hairily odorous.
Even shaving his revolting fleece off proved to be a horrid sort of task, and I was very pleased when I had done and could dump it all on the compost heap. Dog hair takes ages to decompose, but I thought it had so much acid fox poo in it that it might speed up the process a bit.
Rosie was next. She was not limp and unresisting. She fought hard for the entire time, her little legs curled into her chest like a deceased spider, emitting a toothy, grumbling growl all the while.
After that there was the sweeping up, and the washing up from the pancakes. These are jolly good. You make them with the sort of squirty spray oil that purports, with questionable accuracy, not to make you fat. Then you mix a lot of eggs with two or three spoons of flour, some tomato purée and garlic, Worcester sauce and some milk, and fry it into pancakes. I roll them up with some cream cheese in the middle and they last me all week.
Of course by the time I had finished it all the day was done and it was time to get ready for work, which is where I am now.
I have left the dogs shivering gloomily on the sofa. They were so forlorn that they would not even stir when I filled their dinner dishes.
I don’t care. We will have a pleasant journey down the motorway tomorrow. Well, I will, anyway.
It is a dog’s life.
