Rosie has taken to eating things.
Whilst I was in Cambridge she ate a very lot of leaves from the beautiful Swiss Cheese plant in the conservatory, and almost all of an enormous, about-to-flower lily.
Lilies are supposed to be deadly poison for dogs but it was well over a week ago and she has not died yet, and so I can reassure you now that you need not believe everything you read on the mighty Internet. Some of it is tripe. Certainly the lily does not seem to have done her any noticeable harm, apart from the trouble in which she found herself when Mark came home.
Today she has eaten a stick that she got out of the fireplace. Actually she has not eaten it. She has chewed it into a million savage splinters which she has planted in the carpet especially for a disabled person to stand on with bare feet.
This has proved even more harmful to her than the lily, and she is now curled up as closely as she can get to Roger Poopy, feeling that the world is a deeply unjust place, and nobody cares, in which she may well be right.
I am feeling that the world is unjust today. Actually I do not think it is unjust. I think I am making a pig’s ear of it.
Readers, I burned the biscuits.
I thought I had got them out of the oven. I do not know why I thought this, because quite clearly I hadn’t. If I had got them out of the oven they would have been steaming gently on the worktop under a tea towel. Their absence should have been a Clue.
Not only did I fail to read that clue, I failed to notice the next important Clue, which came a couple of hours later, when a strong smell of burning began to waft up the stairs.
I thought vaguely that somebody somewhere must be burning something, and carried on with what I was doing, which was having a Zoom writing workshop with some people from my course. I am not very good at Zoom and keep talking at the wrong moments, so I have to concentrate. Also it always horrifies me to realise what I actually look like when I am talking, because it turns out that I pull some very peculiar faces.
I did not notice until I came to put some chicken in the oven for Mark’s dinners some considerable time later, and discovered it was filled with black biscuits.
They were so black that even Rosie will not eat them. I am cross about this, because she will eat deadly poisonous lilies and sticks, for goodness’ sake.
She can have them for dinner anyway.
I was very, very upset, and rang Mark to ask if he thought I might have dementia. He thought probably not, but I am not entirely convinced.
He was of the opinion that I have been too busy thinking about dragons to concentrate on anything usefully sensible, and although he is probably right, I was not consoled. I am going to have to pull myself together.
I did pull myself together sufficiently to make more biscuits, and determinedly played some cheery sing-along music to encourage myself whilst I did it. I was not quite convinced that I had cheered up but we have got biscuits now and I have even washed up again.
I would just like to add, as a final cheering note for the weekend, that my foot has not recovered in the least. I limped round to Sainsbury’s this morning and was very relieved to rest it on my drag-along stool when I got back. After I had burned the biscuits I had to limp back there again because I did not have any more butter for Biscuits The Sequel. It is a whole week now and I am beginning to feel impatient with it.
It had jolly well better hurry up. The bluebells are out, the cuckoo is calling and I want to go for a walk.
Maybe next week.
