Walking The Dog

Ten little things you probably know about men already - that saying to your male partner that you 'like the red one ... because it's red' is the surest route to suffering patronising ridicule when purchasing a car that trying to give directions to a man when you are unable to quote the actual road numbers - never mind the fact that you accurately state 'third turning on the left after the postbox opposite the Fighting Hens pub' - will result in the same ridicule as in 1. above that filling the dishwasher is a man's job. Only he will maximise the mug-space-potential. It may take him several minutes of tutting and sighing noisily but he will fit every last mug on the worktop into the dishwasher if it's the last thing he does. It usually is the last thing. As he struggles manfully on, long after everyone else has gone to bed. that men think women incapable of packing a car boot with the luggage, prams, cycle helmets, dozens of soft toys and picnic boxes ...

On Friday, I caught myself thinking “I really don’t want Monday to come.” Shortly followed by “If I think like that I’ll spoil the next two days.” Spoiling in this context refers to walking around in a dream, refusing to make decisions about anything, forgetting the location of the car keys, putting off doing jobs, allowing the washing to grow into piles that would require a troop of sherpas and several laundry-basket-carrying pack-horses to transport down one flight of stairs, failing again to find my green fingers and plant up my pots, not submitting (of course!) and procrastinating into the wee small sleepless hours. Why? Does working somewhere new do this to everyone? Or does it just happen to me? It’s not the foreign place, nor the clientele but the threat of an alien computer system.  Which has a logging-in and password set up that  never  works at the first attempt.  A practice with its own way of doing things; that files letters in irretrievable...

Why are fairy cakes so called? Littlest thinks it may have something to do with their pinkness and typical fairy-dust-like sprinkling of coloured sugar which is a fine theory when the cakes are pink and sprinkled, but fails when they are brown and decorated with chocolate shavings - So are fairy-cakes cakes for fairies or inspired by fairies; cakes that may at any moment turn into frogs or sprout butterfly wings and fly (butterfly-cakes!); cakes that are tiny enough to be eaten by fairies, or ones that taste of fairy having been made from dessicated, ground-up fairies? Which reminds me - there's a dessicated mouse on a step down to the cellar. The light down there is dim and he is long-enough dead not to smell, so he has long gone unnoticed and is much trodden-on and flattened. I'm squeamish when it comes to the removal of deceased vermin. Four-legged-friend is not squeamish, but has never ventured down the steep, winding steps into the cellar. Something tempted him to t...

Boys are ... well? Just boys. Show them a muddy puddle and they get into it; a bowl full of food and they ask for more; another boy and they preen and strut before launching themselves at each other; the whiff of a bird and they happily sniff around following her trail all day ... I am of course talking about boy dogs . Some boys - the two legged sort - while having fewer disgusting habits than their canine friends (Bertie Baggins although handsome and loveable has some truly stomach-churning tastes in 'food' - I only deign to refer to it as food because he eats it. And yes - I am referring to poo), do display a tendency toward remarkable mind-temporarily-unhinged-from-body moments. For example, walking along the top of six foot walls; leaping into pools of water of uncertain depth; jumping out of windows - first-floor windows, okay it was onto an elevated grass bank, but what if he'd missed?; catching thrown grapes in their mouths; playing the hold-your-hand-in-a-candl...

Imagine being asked by a colleague, "How old do you feel?" I was. It was the end of a long morning. I wanted to get home. I was fairly fed up - all the reasons for not working were clamouring for space inside my head while being suppressed with fluctuating forcefulness by a timorous voice of reason that was reminding me that work means money and money means ... well, almost everything. The colleague is someone I know reasonably well - well enough to ask to provide a reference for other jobs, not well enough to know the name of her husband, or where she had just been on holiday, or indeed why she might want to know if I was feeling as decrepit as I probably looked. There appeared to be several ways of answering - from the self destructive "Not as old as you!" to the cowardly "Ooh, I don't know - older than yesterday." While the self-destructive option would have had the result of never working for her again, the voice of reason won and instead I s...

It's that time of year when a time-poor gardener wishes that the plants would grow at least half as fast as the grass and the weeds. And Bertie Baggins wonders what a bucket is doing in a wheel-barrow ... two reasons - one is to avoid dangling chains of poo strung together with indigestible lengths of weed that perplex a pup who can't quite reach to tug them out and the other is that the weeder handle has been chewed enough times already. Four-legged-friend meanwhile decides to be helpful and starts pulling out the daffodil leaves ... which isn't actually helpful because they had been left to go brown because we want the daffodils to flower again next year. But Four-legged-friend is not aware of the need for photosynthesis and putting strength back into the bulb and it's a good game and he's only copying what I'm doing. Nobody told him that daffodils aren't weeds. Or that what he is pulling at is a daffodil. Or what a weed is. Whil...