Werk

I was  sharply summoned into the morning today by a neighbour banging on the back door.

He wanted to tell me that my taxi had a flat tyre, and also to find out where Mark was.

I had a go at blowing it up with the cigarette-lighter pump, to no avail, although I did get chance to hang around the back alley for twenty minutes, explaining to curious passers-by where Mark is.

In the end I gave up and drove it – complete with flat tyre – to the garage across the road. It blew up easily enough, and I rushed away before the garage chap started talking to me. I am going to put a notice in the front window of the taxi that says He Is Away On A Course.

I called Mark, who is away on a course, by the way, to discuss my options. He said that of course there was always his taxi, which I could have used if mine would not go, except that he had inadvertently gone to Aberdeen with the keys in his pocket, so I was on my own.

I stood next to my tyre for a little while, but it was not hissing, so I decided just to leave it alone and see if it stayed inflated. I thought that perhaps if it didn’t I could just give up and go back to bed, but I was disappointed, on setting out for work later, to discover that it was still as round as ever, and so I had no excuse.

After I had finished faffing about with that, and the firewood, and the dog-emptying, and all of the other things that occupy the beginning of every day, I pretended to be Mark for a while and filled in a pile of oil industry forms. He is really too dyslexic to do this reliably, and eventually he had got fed up of scowling at them, and forwarded them on to me in an email simply titled Werk, which cheered up my morning considerably, not least because it is, after all, easily the most sensible spelling it could have, and made me wonder why we do not use it.

Today’s Job Of The Day was, as I think I mentioned, the dog haircuts. I am sorry to say that I abandoned this project exactly halfway through, that is after all of Roger Poopy and half of Tonka. This was not because I was bored, although it had been such a tiresome chore that it would have been difficult to pinpoint which of us was enjoying it the least, but because the clippers were not terribly sharp, and proved completely unequal to their matted, grease-laden winter fleeces.

Roger Poopy hated it. At first he curled himself into a tight ball, refusing to release any part of him to be shorn. I tugged a paw at a time loose, but as soon as I released my grip even for a millisecond, it sprang back to bury itself beneath the furry safety of his body. After a while I got cross with him, and then he gave up and pretended to be dead. He collapsed into a limp, heavy puddle of dog, with just the occasional self-pitying whimper betraying his continued sentience. I was not very sympathetic. It is difficult to give a dog a haircut, and I would defy even Vidal Sassoon to do a respectable job on somebody who leaped away to hide under the table every time he stopped to clean his clippers.

In the end he was done. I hoped that Tonka, who is after all a southerner, might turn out to be a little less densely furred, but actually he was even worse, and after the first ten minutes, during which he alternately cried and glared at me, I stopped, ordered some new clippers on Amazon, and released them all until tomorrow.

I hope the clippers turn up early. I have got to take Tonka to the vet tomorrow afternoon, and at the moment he looks ridiculous.

He doesn’t seem to mind. He can see where he is going and he has the benefit of still being warm in his revolting winter coat.

Until tomorrow.