Mark does seem to occupy a jolly lot of time somehow.
He has only been home for one day, but I did not get anything important done. I wanted to do some painting and write my story, but instead I got sidetracked into cooking masses of burgers and lamb kebabs, and sweeping up his sawdusty footprints.
I do not mind the sawdusty footprints because he has been working in the yard. He has fixed my taxi. It now has both reversing lights and a glued-together back light lens from the terrible time when the dustbin was loitering about in the road at the crucial moment.
Also the rear windscreen wiper will no longer be on all of the time.
All of these things are very welcome improvements to my life.
In the meantime I have been organising the Feeding A Husband project. This takes a lot of time and is a lot more expensive than you think. I stopped in at Booths on my way back from the hospital and was horrified when it cost me thirty four pounds. This is because when by myself I do not bother eating sausages and beef burgers. Indeed, I do not eat meat at all. This is not because of Higher Principles, regular readers will know that these do not form a greater part of my characteristics, but because it is a colossal faff to cook, expensive, and gives me indigestion. I am just as contented with fish, indeed, prefer it, especially when it has been smoked. Marks & Spencer’s smoked trout is possibly one of the finest foods available to mankind. If you have not tried it then I highly recommend that you do so, except please do not go to Kendal’s Marks and Spencer, because I do not want them to be sold out when I get there.
I like to eat meat when I go out and do not have to trouble myself with greasy cooking pots, at least, as long as I have taken an indigestion tablet first, oh, the perils of being elderly.
Once I had filled the oven with all kinds of husband-related stodge , I set about my not-much-looked-forward-to task of the day, which was to give the poor dogs a haircut.
It is far too late in the year to be doing this, because the poor creatures are going to be chilly. I should have done it in September, but September was wracked with icy winds and deluging rain, and I did not have the heart. October, on the other hand, has been mild and temperate so far, so much so that I expect in a few days the BBC will be stridently announcing that it has been the Hottest October Since Records Began Three Weeks Ago.
Anyway, it has been warmish, and if I had left the dogs any longer they would have begun to look like those cows that you see in pictures, standing next to people who live in Tibet. By January they would have been no longer suitable to be considered domestic animals.
They were woolly.
They heard me getting the clippers out and doing all of the pre-haircut soft-furnishing removal out of the conservatory, and promptly belted off upstairs to hide under the desk, from whence they had to be dragged, forcibly.
I did Roger Poopy first, because he is the fastest. He is twice the size of Rosie, but she fights the hardest. Poor Roger fights for the first few minutes, after which he pretends to be dead, presumably in the optimistic hope that I will not bother giving a dead dog a haircut.
I was not convinced, and after an hour and some traumatised whimpering, he was done.
Rosie was next. For somebody who is very full of puppies she fought like a girl with stuck-on eyelashes and fingernails whose boyfriend has just been spotted snogging somebody else in a nightclub.
Still, in the end it was all right, although I had to enlist Mark to help with the last bits. Nobody got bitten, although I confess I had to restrain myself once or twice, and there was no bloodshed, so all in all it could have been worse.
I think I have got dog hair in all of my clothes.
I am sitting on the taxi rank fidgeting and longing for a shower.
Their loss appears to have been my gain.
