Walking The Dog

...  for now I am in a holiday humor  W Shakespeare Family holidays. Or six go travelling while two go to prison/canine-holiday-camp aka. kennels. The two-legged, travelling members of the family pose for a shadow pic - shadows lengthened by the evening sun have lengthened anyway with passing years (... mine, though, appears to have broadened). And I wonder how many more of these shadow pictures there will be and if we shall ever pose just six of us, again. Or if the breadth generally of our shadow profile will extend to include partners and children and when and who they will be. And dreaming of wider shadows and little hands and little arms reaching across the gaps, I define and re-define family. As generations have before. Poignant. And joyous. And wonderful. What is a holiday if not a time for sentimental dreaming? Holiday  -  noun  - defn: an extended period away from work or school; often spent away from home or travelling ...

The work do. That unique cocktail of duty, deference, dread, drama and dignity. It exists in many forms - from the snatched coffee at the nearest coffee shop to the full black-tied, multi-coursed, competitively-dressed, formal, vast-venued dinner with all sizes and shapes of gathering in between. They are associated with a stalwart we-are-all-in-this-together mentality and are, we are told, proven to be good for team work and bonding. So we commit to the do, even if staying in to clean and re-grout the bath might be a more attractive or more appealing option for an evening's entertainment. Attending your partner's work do might elevate bleaching the loo to a preferred way to pass the hours. However, however, however ... my cheeks are burning as I admit that it needn't be so. If the dread can be swept under the carpet and the gossip suppressed and the bitchy 'I can't believe she's wearing that' tongues bitten, it can be fun. When your partner's colle...

Littlest, wearing a classically draped dress (think Roman statue and generous folds of cloth), commented that her small frame didn't fill the dress, hence the draped effect and that this was due to her perimeter being somewhat less than the perimeter of the (modestly framed) friend who leant her the dress. "Perimeter?" I queried. "You mean circumference? Perimeter is usually used to describe the edge of something vast, like a sports's field." "Ye-e-es ..." she pondered, not really concentrating. But in not concentrating, she insulted her friend (who is most definitely not vast) and forced my brain to momentarily juggle 'perimeters' - bra size? Dress size? Waist? Hips? Chalked dead-body-on-the-floor outline? Height? Of course, she meant dress size. The dress she had borrowed was a size 8. Littlest barely fills age-appropriate dresses and could probably fit her perimeter into some age 8 clothes. Which got me thinking - the age at which...

Another season. Another picture of the never-sat-upon bench.  Not sat upon by me anyway.  What would I do were I to sit there?  Probably fret about not pruning, mowing, clipping, picking, weeding, trimming, burning, edging, feeding, watering, planting and writing/reading/blogging. Arguably, I could do the last three from the bench, but as I haven't sat on it, I don't know if the house internet stretches that far. Reading doesn't need the internet. I could sit and read. But I would need blinkers to hide the 'hello-we-thought-you'd-missed-us-so-we're-just-going-to-perform-a-little-seed-scattering-dance-in-the-breeze-for-you' weeds. And it would also require a plentiful supply of bribery for Four-legged-friend and Bertie Baggins, to stop them bothering me until I get up; I suspect they think I'm ill when I stop and need to check that I can still move and that the hand that feeds them hasn't popped her clogs. Or that some other cliche-ridden disas...