Skip to main content

A dog less walked is ...

What is it with children and towels?

Mine (children) appear to think that their (towels) reside on the floor and are careless of their particular addresses. Allotted towel residences include flooring of the carpeted, tiled or wooden variety, on landing, stairs, playroom, bedroom, or kitchen. And in the latter abode, the said towel is quickly appropriated by the four legged tenant who pushes, pulls and shoves it into a soft, hair-covered heap, that he then sits on and chews.

Wooden towel racks lurk in dark corners of the house, ignored, forlorn and recklessly unemployed. Sometimes they are joined by the shoe rack, washing basket, cardboard tubes from the inside of loo rolls, and toothpaste caps, all seeking solidarity in their collectively pointless lives. Maybe the sock eating monster takes solace there too, following particularly rigorous forays under beds and in the bottom of wardrobes, and might hang the odd odd sock on the empty rails of the towel rack in an act of healing.

The same magic (mildly marinated), midnight (usually) fairy who makes the children's beds; empties the bath and picks up the soap also picks up the towels.What's her name? Muggins, of course.

And why is this called a dog less walked? Because a dog less walked yesterday is a dog more vigorously animated today. And one who woke at 5am, which is when I scribbled above mini rant on a piece of paper.

... After nearly falling over a towel on the stairs.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Colour, Delacroix, flochetage and why don't we all have a go at inventing words

Yes - it is a real word. Flochetage. Well, a real-ish word. One invented by the painter Delacroix, when he found the dictionary cupboard bare and required a word to describe his technique of layering different coloured paints, using lightly pulled brush strokes to create texture and pattern and thereby enhance his base-layer colours (... lost? - stick around, read on and all will become clear. Or perhaps muddier ...). Flochetage implies both stringiness and threadiness. Apparently. And it sounds good - in a filling-the-mouth-with-sound sort of a way. Try it ... flochetaaaage. Not that I speak French. So I am probably mis-pronouncing it. Nor am I an artist. So what do I know about painting techniques - except that I think this one works. What I do like is the concept - you invent a new technique in whatever it is you do, hunt around for the vocabulary to describe it, find the dictionary is lacking, so make up a word of your own and announce to the world what it means. Delacroix isn&#

My beloved boy, how lucky I have been

It's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die ... and I say someone here even though the one in question was a dog - but to us he had character and a place forever in our hearts and was more of a familiar someone than some of the people in our lives. So, I'll start again - it's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die, our senses go into overdrive. We notice things that normally would be part of the background of our every day. We breathe more - or rather, we don't but what we do is notice our breathing more, as we watch his. We pause. We think. We listen to ourselves and our inner voices speak. Memories flood our dreams ... though sleep is fitful.  Why am I telling you this? ... ... we lost this beautiful boy today And in the hours before he went, I saw perfect spheres of dew on blades of grass - little orbs holding micro-images of our world; a bumble bee drunk on nectar, yellow-dusted with pollen, resting in a crocus; ten - yes, ten!

Tut, Tut, soggy feet again

"Tut, Tut, looks like rain." Tut, Tut probably isn't the first thing that springs to mind when viewing this picture. And faced with bleak weather and a sad-looking symbol of national pride it is unlikely that many would consider a small bear  a personage of sufficient gravitas to quote. However, Walking the Dog was in Scotland ( was rather than is, because was there last week without internet). And Walking the Dog likes Pooh. That sort of Pooh - the sort with an 'h' at the end. A. A. Milne had a lot to say about the weather. He gave Eeyore my favourite weather-related observation , "The nicest thing about the rain is that it always stops. Eventually." And last Thursday, it did stop. Long enough for Littlest and I to walk to our pooh-sticks bridge. Long enough for us to get half way there, along the grassy path. Long enough for us to chat to the cows (we had to shout as they stubbornly stayed at the distant end of the fie