There was another slug last night.
It had climbed into one of the dogs’ bowls.
I had to be brave. I copied Oliver and took it out to the compost heap in a tissue. I did not even shriek.
I hope you are impressed. I do not like slugs very much.
I was going to throw the dog food away and wash the bowl out but then I realised that the dogs were still eating it anyway, so I didn’t bother. Most certainly I would not want my dinner if a slug had been helping itself to it first, but the dogs will happily eat cow poo if I do not supervise them closely, so I suppose they have different nutritional and hygiene expectations, ie, none whatsoever.
The poor dogs have had a very difficult day. It is warm. We have finally caught a little bit of the heatwave that is scorching across Britain. It was not quite enough for me to take my jersey off, but I am wearing it with shorts, so perhaps it doesn’t count as clout-casting.
It made for a glorious walk this morning. The day was bright and warm and the dew was still sparkling on the grass, and I heard my first cuckoo of the year. I was very pleased about this, spring is really here. Also there are house martins nesting under the eaves of our next door neighbour’s house. They have got a lot of very squeaky babies. I am feeling very sympathetic towards the poor exhausted parents, who are very busy indeed. The front garden is full of fluttering and chirping and little excited scuffly noises coming from behind the joists.
The dogs’ day was made difficult by my executive decision that they needed a haircut. Partly this was because Roger tiresome Poopy rolled in badger poo on our walk this morning, but mostly it was because they have become scruffily hairy, and we are about to have some warm weather. Rosie is obliged to cool off by jumping in the tarn every morning, and whilst I agree with her in spirit, the tarn is very muddy and it mostly seems to come off all over the carpets later, which is doing nothing to help the spring cleaning reach its conclusion.
In any case smartening the dogs up could be considered an important part of having a tidy house. There are no middle-class points to be scored if your house is beautiful and gleaming but your dog is a misbegotten hairy creature plastered in mud and cow dung.
Hence this afternoon I emptied the conservatory of everything that I did not wish to be covered in dog hair and plugged in the clippers.
They knew what was coming at that very moment, and Rosie belted off upstairs where I later discovered her shivering frantically and hiding underneath my desk.
Roger was not quite so fast and hence had the honour of the first haircut.
He lay on the table miserably, curled up in the tightest ball he could manage, trembling and clutching his paws to his chest, but I was relentless, and by dint of some violence and possibly rather excessive force, eventually he surrendered and we got on with it.
The problem with dog haircutting is that they are most fidgety and wriggly whilst you are cutting around the most sensitive bits. You cannot say Just Stay Still For A Moment, they do not understand and do not care. Their whole being is suffused with the longing to leap off the table and dash off to hide under the sofa. There was some blood when I had finished Roger Poopy, and I felt terribly guilty and apologetic, and stroked him and told him how sorry I was.
I discovered afterwards that it was my blood, probably from one of the more extreme elbow-in-the-throat moments.
Rosie was next, and she was worse. She is half of the size of Roger Poopy, but fights a lot harder, with a sort of silent determination that would make you not want to pick a fight with her even if you were a German Shepherd and the odds ought to be on your side.
In the end they were both done, and I took them upstairs for a bath, to banish the last traces of the badger poo. I had to clean the whole bathroom afterwards. Even after a haircut they were still pretty revolting.
They were very pleased to be hairless, of course, and belted around the Library Gardens with a joyful abandon when I took them out later, so all was well that ended well.
I spent the rest of the day spring cleaning, but I don’t suppose you want to hear about that.
