Dog tale

Tonight I am not sorry to be at work.

Mark has taken the floors up in the bathroom and the upstairs landing again.

He is doing something to the water.

He has explained this to me but I still do not know what he means. I simply know that by the end of it, whenever that might be, I will have water in the new kitchen.

It is starting to look very splendid now.

You can see it in the photograph.

We might have had water in it already, except that the day got off to rather a slow start.

This was entirely predictable, because we had a ridiculously late night.

After I came in from work we strolled across to the Library Gardens for a last late-night bed-time emptying of the dogs. There, in the dark, a black shadow hurtled joyfully towards us, and of course it was the Peppers. We hung about chatting for a while, and then thought, sensibly, that we would just have one small nightcap together, as a way of saying goodnight to one another.

At three in the morning we rocked raucously out of the conservatory and staggered to bed, still giggly.

When the alarm went off this morning we regretted this, and hung about with our coffee rather longer than we should.

This won’t happen very often again now, because they are about to reopen their guest house, and sooner or later people will be allowed to dance and be happy again, and then we will be at work the whole time. This is probably just as well, because it has turned out that when we are allowed to do exactly what we like, we have got no self-control whatsoever.

We met them again this morning on our walk, which took rather longer than usual because Roger Poopy’s father, who is going a bit senile, forgot on the way home that he had already been for his walk, and wandered off back to the park again. He got a bit upset when he couldn’t find us, and was relieved when we rushed back up the slope, bellowing at him crossly.

After that they came round to do some neighbourly exchanging of drill bits for everybody’s day’s labours.

We were all standing chatting in the alley whilst the dogs rampaged about, when we realised that Pepper had disappeared.

This started off as a bit of ambling about shouting for her, and turned into a full-scale panicked hunt, up and down the village and around all of the places that she likes to go.

She did not come back, even when we rang the vet and the police.

Eventually she turned up in next door’s garden, where she had just popped in to see if he had any unwanted dog food lying about, and then got stuck when the gate shut behind her.

Our next door neighbour did not find her because he had gone out, and had promised to keep his eyes open on his way to the library.

She did not seem to mind having been stuck in a garden by herself, and wagged about happily, pleased to be reunited with Roger Poopy again.

After that we had breakfast, by which time it was afternoon.

I had promised Oliver that I would make cakes, which I did, and some mayonnaise for good measure.

I meant to do all sorts of other things as well, like cleaning the bathroom. It turned out to be a Good Thing that I did not get round to this, because by the time I got to it Mark had taken the floor up, and was lying with his head stuck between the joists, swearing.

I thought that probably the best idea would be to leave him in peace, since being helped just makes him cross.

I packed some tea and a sandwich and sloped off to work. This has paid off nicely, because I have only been here for a couple of hours, and I have made £3.70 already.

Have a picture of the new kitchen sink. The worktop is made of lots of bits of worktop all glued together. We did not break the corner off. It was already broken when we bought the bits of stone on eBay.Mark has got it and says that he will glue it back on.

I keep imagining it with beautiful peacock tiles and a window frame in the hole in the wall.

It is going to be perfect.