Dilemma…

Fortunately Saturday night turned out to be quite busy.

I don’t mean busy by Easter weekend standards, or even by any-weekend-in-June standards, but sufficiently busy for us to be scooting on and off the taxi rank without time to read six chapters or knit a couple of inches of cardigan in between customers.

This was remarkably welcome, roll on summer.

It was just as well we had a busy evening, because we have had two quite shamefully not-busy days. We have had to get up early because of feeding Oliver and getting him off to work, and Mark looked at me yesterday and explained, with unflattering accuracy, that I looked so truly ghastly that I ought to go back to bed.

I went back to bed.

Today we both went back to bed because he was looking ghastly as well.

We think we are trying to squeeze too many things into a week.

We can’t do very much about this, because weeks are ridiculously short and there are an awful lot of things that have got to be shoehorned into them. We had a small House Meeting between the two of us this evening to see if there was anything we could do differently, but in fact in the course of it we remembered a couple of dozen more things that we ought to be doing, and so we are just going to have to get on with it. Mark is going to have to fix his car this week, and so he is not going to install any rural broadband tomorrow or even the day after. He is going to take the engine apart and change the turbo and the cam belt and possibly even the body control module, which is responsible for the electronic demon currently haunting the windscreen wipers and the locks and all of the other tiresome features of a modern car.

I am going to be responsible for cleaning, catering and Any Other Business in the meantime, and when I am doing nothing I am going to carry on writing a best-selling novel.

In other news, the visiting dog has finally succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome and caved in to become a reasonable member of the household. It has not bitten anybody since Friday morning, and today it miserably allowed us not only to wash its eyes and fill them with cream, but to force a painkilling tablet between its tightly-clenched teeth. It has submitted to being stroked and shoved out of the way and tripped over and all of the usual dog indignities that go on in our house without a murmur of protest, and we all know that it has given in. It is not even growling warnings at us any more. It has become a Civilised Dog.

The painkiller is because we think part of its general savagery is being caused by it being in some sort of pain. We do not know what. We have checked its teeth and its eyes are clear now, but it has an endless horrid smelling discharge out of one of its ears, and yelps if you touch it.

It is a very troubling little creature. It smells considerably better since it realised it was not the most important personage in this household, which Mark says is because it does not have so much testosterone, although basically I think several baths and endlessly boiling its bedding have helped as much as anything. We are in the very uncomfortable position of not liking it very much because it is a complete nuisance, but knowing that when its owners return it will be condemned to a life of unending painful misery.

Its owners are too frightened of it to do anything at all. They will not put cream in its sore eyes or trim away the hair that grows into them. They will not bath it or give it flea tablets or look in its ears. They are so frightened that it will bite them, which it did, often, that they have left it in a dreadful state of blindness, deafness, and crawling-with-fleas  rawness.

I do not know what to do. I am cross with its owners who are really not fit to have a dog. I do not in the least want to keep it but sending it back will be an act of terrible cruelty.

It is not a happy choice to have to make.

Answers on a postcard…