Oliver came with me on my walk this morning, which was rather nice.
It was a beautiful autumn morning, cool and sunny, and we pludged through the mud contentedly. I was a little less contented than Oliver because his legs are longer than mine, and I was huffing a bit to keep up.
We braved the cows without incident, although we had to wait until they had stopped being agitated by a large and noisy family of tourists, accompanied by some tiresomely barking dogs. We had seen, and also heard them on our way down, and we desired their company no more than the cows did.
We dumped the dogs off at home and went to Booths, in order to make sure I have got adequate nourishment in the house to feed Oliver, who is either growing or who has caught Mark’s tapeworm. We bought all sorts of things suitable for a growing boy, like pizza and sliced bread and cake, and I resolved to top them up with a trip to Asda tomorrow, after I have been to get my hair cut.
I am looking forward to this. My hair is not very long, but it is beginning to stick up as if I were a nineteen eighties porcupine who had tastelessly invested in a permanent wave. I had one of those in that era. Now I can’t imagine why I bothered, since my hair curls anyway, but the selling point was that it would make your hair curl the way you wanted it to, instead of all over the place as if you had just got it stuck in a gorse bush and had to retreat backwards. It didn’t work. My hair frizzed shockingly, rather like a large Brillo pad, and I was not at all sorry when it grew out some months later.
I am not going to have a perm this week. I am going to get it all shorn off so that by the time we start on the Christmas holiday activities it will be just about long enough to look middle class, and not as though I have just had treatment for nits. In the meantime it will involve hardly any use of shampoo and I will be able to towel it dry before bedtime.
I towel it dry anyway, only it is a bit too long to dry properly, and there is a damp patch on the pillow.
Once returned we retreated to our separate activities. Oliver went upstairs to shoot Russians in his bedroom. This is the adult version of shooting zombies. Mark says that the games are not real games but secret plots by the Pentagon so that youthful gamers think they are shooting down cyber-drones but actually they are operating an extremely low-budget plan of attack somewhere over Ukraine.
I am not sure this is true.
I went downstairs to make sushi and to faff about with washing. I am still not at the end of the washing. That is, it is all washed now, and by tomorrow I have hopes that the last of it will be dry. Mark sent me a photograph halfway through. It is Lucy’s stove, beautifully set up in her living room. It looks splendid.
My last adventure before going out to work was to bath the wretched dogs. Roger Poopy has smelled so revolting for the last week that nobody has wanted to stroke him, and he has been drooping about the house in a melancholy of unloved gloom.
They did not want to be shoved into the bath, and had to be dragged along the landing, paws smoking on the carpet. I washed Roger twice, but I am not sure he was greatly improved afterwards. I might have to have another go in a day or two.
Rosie is getting very stout.
In just three more weeks we will have some puppies.
