Love of a dog

I have run around like a greyhound desperate not to be sent to the knackers yard.

I have dashed from one job to the next with barely a space in between for eating porridge with yoghurt.

I woke up at eight o’clock.

By lunchtime I had walked miles over the fells, pegged the washing in the garden, spent half of my takings on ethical sustenance in Booths, scrubbed out the dogs’ bowls, cleaned out my taxi, watered the conservatory, and swept and mopped everywhere.

Goodness, I was pleased with myself.

You wouldn’t get many of me for your rubies, I can tell you.

The point of all of this, apart from the tiresome and unavoidable one of it being Monday again, was so that I could spend the afternoon getting  around to editing my story.

I didn’t get very much of this done, partly because I was exhausted after dashing about all morning, and partly because when Mark called, he reminded me that we were overdrawn, and I recalled that I had not done various mundane but importantly functional tasks involving banks and other tedious administration, so I did those, and then dashed off to the Post Office to pay in the weekend’s takings.

I had had a jolly good night on Sunday, marred only by the presence of some idiots, which as Mark sagely observed, is always going to happen on a busy night, just because of statistics. Statistically I have come to suspect that a high proportion of the human race are, in fact, complete muppets.

There was a family on holiday with some little girls, who jumped all over the back seat in their muddy wellies. When I requested that they sit down, preferably on the spot that they had just covered in mud in the hope that some of it would be wiped off by their coats, their mother said, accusingly, Oh, they’re only playing.

Their grandmother told me afterwards that they should have been in school and that their mother had pretended they were sick in order to come to the Lake District on their holidays, so probably she was their father’s mother.

There was a complete clown who did not have the first idea where he was going, and when I finally extracted sufficient information to find his guest house, he said to me: Oh, it’s here on the left, as we pulled up outside. I resisted saying I know that, that’s how we got here, but would have liked to poke him in the eye.

The last idiots were a couple with a dog, who were determined that it should not travel in the boot. I explained that the alternative was for the dog to be a pedestrian, and in the end they agreed. There is a perfectly comfortable dog bed in the boot, but their dog, they said, was an anxious little flower and should travel on the back seat.

Dogs are completely prohibited from getting on the seats of the taxi, partly because of the mud and their horrible tendency to throw up, see the previous entry, but partly because this is, in any case actually illegal. The boot, where they are allowed to travel, becomes so filthy that every time I hoover it I am always profoundly glad of my steadfast application of the not-on-the-seats rule.

This particular nit-wit took exception.

She railed at me all the way back. I couldn’t ever have had any animals, being so heartless, a person as cruel and wicked as me could never have known what it is like to have a dog as a companion. I ought to get a dog, she said, because then I would have somebody to love me. She went on to expand upon this, going into some fantastical detail about how she imagined I had been unloved for my whole life, and that she wasn’t surprised because of my horrible unkindness, and that I need not imagine anybody would ever love me, because they wouldn’t. I was, she said, doomed to a lonely old age.

Obviously I did not dignify any of this with a reply, except to say that I thought she was being very discourteous, and turned the taxi round to take them back in the direction from which we had come.

Some people deserve to walk home.

We got almost a mile along the road before she hauled the dog out of the boot of the car on to the back seat, at which point I stopped the taxi and chucked them out.

I left them standing in the road, still yelling.

I got home to discover that Rosie had chewed a stick into a thousand fragments all over the floor.

I thought how wonderful it was to have the loving companionship of a dog.