We have got a very lot of dogs.
I mean a very, very lot.
Four dogs in a Victorian terraced house makes it seem very full, especially since we also have a nice new girl and also, of course, the incontinent cat.
The girl is Oliver’s girlfriend Emily, and she is very nice indeed. The incontinent cat is, of course, Guffy, who is also nice, if you don’t mind the leaking.
I regret to say that at least two out of the four dogs are also leaking, being Rosie and Poppy, who, irritatingly, are both in season. There maybe another leaking dog, since one of them appears to have had an accident on the living room carpet, although since we do not know which one, it might be one of the ones that is leaking already.
Having two in-season dogs is not making life very peaceful. All four dogs are behaving like the sort of teenagers whose parents have gone off for a long weekend and neglected to hide the key to the drinks cabinet. They are bouncing about noisily and crawling all over one another, I am very glad my days of hormones are over.
Oliver and Emily came with me on the walk this morning, because I felt inadequate to manage four dogs of yet untested compliance without some assistance. It was a good thing to do really, because lots of the tadpoles are out of the tarn now, and are also bouncing about energetically. There are thousands of them, actually thousands, and the long grass is alive with them, like a plague of very overweight ants, and we watched them for ages.
In fact the dogs behaved reasonably well on the walk, although it was a wet day, and the visiting dogs were absolutely filthy by the time we got back. Both of them had long hair, note the past tense, and by the time we got home they were thick with mud. I would not have been surprised to discover a few tadpoles in there as well.
This meant there was no debate about their fate, and I spent the afternoon giving them both haircuts, so that they are now bald. Neither of them enjoyed this very much, although Poppy surrendered quite quickly. Tonka did not, and had to be restrained, with some threatening growling and an elbow in his throat. He did not at all like having the awful dreadlocks trimmed out from between his toes, and almost bit me, recollecting at the very last moment that this would not be a good idea.
He was also covered in ticks. I pulled at least a dozen off him and coated him in Germolene. Poppy did not have any, so he must just taste especially lovely.
I rang the vet then, and made an appointment, because obviously they need anti-tick drugs, and so that is tomorrow afternoon fully occupied as well, it is a busy life being a pet-owner.
After that the clearing up took ages. It had been raining so hard that Guffy had declined to go out, and had remained in the conservatory, watching proceedings from a safe vantage point, but of course that meant that there were Guffy-splodges as well as dog hair and dried mud all over the place. I mopped and swept, and hunted for some spare dog bowls, because Tonka and Poppy forgot to pack theirs.
In the end it was all done, and Oliver and Emily took the dogs off to clown about in the Library Gardens with a ball whilst I rushed about getting ready for work.
I have given Guffy some human stomach medication, the sort that is supposed to replace missing bacteria, and very kindly supplied by Elspeth, who dropped it off this afternoon. I have no idea if this will work, but since there is no conceivable way it could make anything worse, it seemed worth a go.
It is going to be a very busy six weeks, which is how long the dogs will be staying.
It would be nice to have fewer leaks.
