Thoroughly gruntled

I am in bed at Lucy’s house and the adventure is under way.

Mark is having his shower. Lucy and Jack are asleep, and I have just tiptoed into our room to find two chilly bald dogs comfortably asleep on our bed.

I was not impressed and they have now fled downstairs back to their cushion in front of the fire.

They are feeling disgruntled* because nobody has been very interested in dogs and they have hardly been given any exercise at all, having been hastily emptied a handful of times and then obliged to return to whatever we have happened to be doing. They have been patient about this but it is probably only because they can’t actually talk, I have often thought that anybody who dreamily wishes that they could does not know their own dog very well. If Roger and Rosie could talk most of it would be boring squabbles about their ball, and then the rest would be long and tedious explanations about exactly why they should be given cheese for breakfast and allowed to sleep on the sofa.

*Does anybody know exactly what a gruntle is and whether or not one could accurately describe oneself as very thoroughly gruntled after a happy day when everything went well? I suppose I should look it up really but I haven’t.

Getting ready this morning was all a bit of a hurried flap, not least because we slept so thoroughly after the restless worries of the night before that when I turned over and glanced dozily at the clock I realised, rather slowly, that we had been comfortably in the land of Nod for ten hours.

I had not even needed to bother with my wee small hours excursion.

Two hours later we were on the road, the car tightly stuffed with everything I could imagine that we might need. I have already discovered some things we have forgotten, however, and so we will have to call at Tesco again tomorrow.

It is a good job we have left the dogs and the stack of firewood at Lucy’s house because in the morning we are going to collect Grandma. Grandma is not a tiresome passenger, or at least, she will not bark and whine out of the windows if she has a problem, but nevertheless needs a comfortable place for travelling, and we are going to have to rearrange the luggage again when we get up.

It is stuffed very full.

We spent the afternoon at Lucy’s house installing her curtain rails. She now has a sensible draught-excluding curtain behind her front door and our bedroom has got a curtain up at the window. I explained to Mark that this would mean we would very probably be cold in bed, because on my last visits I have been obliged to supplement the quilt with the thermal curtains, but he just rolled his eyes and on the way here we stopped at Tesco and purchased a new duvet for a tenner.

This is comfortably warm and so the curtains are no loss.

Also it will be nice not to be awoken with the dawn.

We did not stay here for the whole time. Once the curtains had been satisfactorily suspended we dashed off to go and visit an old friend of mine. He has been introduced in these pages before now, he is the one whom we must not any longer call Pukey John because he is no longer a fifteen year old with an undeveloped tolerance for alcohol, but a proper grown up with a greying beard.

It is very lovely to have a friend who remembers our mis-spent youth. Almost everybody else who was there is dead now and so there are not many opportunities to talk about it.

He has got a very nice wife these days, and her elderly mother is staying with them. The elderly mother looks so like her daughter that when I walked in I had one of those embarrassing double-take moments where you just stare and can’t think of anything to say. Both of them are tiny and delicate with creamy skin, like meeting elves, and the elderly mother elf had the most astonishing beaming smile, as if she had just been waiting for her whole life for us to arrive. Unfortunately she was too deaf to talk to very much, because when you are ninety five you usually have some interesting stories to tell.

They had cooked us a truly splendid dinner. It was a spicy bean stew, the sort of thing that usually gives Mark the most awful wind, but to my surprise it has not, and it was very good indeed, I must ask him for the recipe.

Mark is snoring now, and so I am going to have to stop. We have got an early start in the morning.

Cambridge by this time tomorrow, or at any rate I hope so.