I have just spent ten minutes hunting around my desk for my glasses. It turned out that wretched Guffy had hidden them a dark corner at the back behind the printer.
They have been considerably batted about in the process and it has not improved them very much, any more than my favourite Billy Joel Greatest Hits LP was improved when Numbers One and Two Daughters, aged about five, put our cat of the time on the turntable on top of it, to see if it would enjoy it like a roundabout, which, you might not be astonished to hear, it didn’t.
Billy Joel Greatest Hits has since been restored to me with the wonderful modern benefit of Spotify, what a splendid world we have these days. You cannot gouge deep scratches into Spotify.
I am writing this in a snatched five minutes whilst Mark is downstairs reacquainting himself with the task of washing up, which is somebody else’s problem when you are on an oil rig, and so he might need to think about it. His mother is visiting us, and has gone to bed, which is where I will be going very soon.
Not the same bed as Mark’s mother, obviously.
She has come for a night of rest and recuperation after looking after her friend with the hip replacement. She sounds to have had a very fraught few weeks, and I suspect when she goes home tomorrow it will take her another few weeks to sleep it off.
This has occupied quite a bit of my day. I went to collect her from her friend’s house this morning, and we called in Kendal on the way back. Mark’s mother had a couple of things that she needed to do, and I was too mean to pay for a car parking space, so I just sat on the taxi rank and waited for her for ten minutes. Frustratingly I could have taken several jobs whilst I was there, but I thought that it might not look good if she got back to find me disappeared, and regretfully, had to decline.
When we got back she went for a little snooze, and I set to my task of the day, which was to give the dogs a haircut, because they were revolting.
Partly I was mildly anxious that they might have picked up fleas from the kitten, which I was relieved to discover that they hadn’t, but worse, the weather has been absolutely ghastly lately, and the fells have become a rippling river of mud. Rosie has jumped in the beck several times, but it has not washed it off, and it has all dried into her fur.
It dried into Roger Poopy’s fur as well, but he is quite a bit taller than Rosie, and so he was truly filthy only up to the knees and just a bit splattered everywhere else. Rosie looked like the sort of illustration you see in Hotel Chocolat of the chocolate bean plant, with small, unappetising brown mud nuggets hanging off her everywhere.
A bath just would not have cut it, and in any case it is bird nesting season, and so a haircut it had to be.
They did not like it. Rosie fought every inch of the way, tucking her paws and tail underneath her so tightly that I became worried that I might accidentally snap one of them off whilst I was trying to uncoil them.
Also she turned out to have horrible dandruff, and to be unpleasantly pongy when I got down to the skin level.
Roger Poopy just went limp and pretended to be dead. He get so frightened about having his fur cut off that it gives him wind, and he lies there in a state of dumb misery, letting off great rancid guffs, as if it might somehow put me off.
It does a bit.
As if their lives had not already taken a shocking turn for the dreadful, after that they were hauled up the stairs and into the bathroom. Some considerable physical force was needed for this bit, because they knew what was coming, and had already made some determined efforts to become invisible.
They are lovely now, and I think they might actually be feeling better. They are sleek and smooth and their remaining fur is soft and shiny. They are fast asleep on clean cushions, because I shoved all of that lot through the wash as well.
I almost don’t want to take them on their walk tomorrow. It seems such a shame to spoil it.
Mark came home and we had a night off. We went to the bistro across the road, and it was wonderful.
The bank holiday weekend is looming ahead of us. I am not in the least looking forward to it, it is going to be horrible.
We have had our holiday tonight, I think.
