Walking The Dog

When Aesop wrote - 'We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office' ... he didn't make allowance for the thief that jumped ship first. Or the one who stabbed other thieves in the back. What happens to them? The one that jumped ship could come back. Some time in the distant future. And be great in public office. The back stabber will be hung. Out to dry. What of other thieves and thievery in general? Thievery - definition: the act of pilfering, stealing or helping oneself to someone else's property.  'Stealing is a crime and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances.' So says the writer Lemony Snicket.  Bertie Baggins is looking for those certain circumstances . He is in a semi-permanent state of hunting for them; his mission to seek and find and present the certainty of the excusability of those circumstances to me. It would be a permanent state if t...

One of our dogs is better at multi-tasking than the other - in response to having his back rubbed, he can wag his tail and eat at the same time. The other dog's tail, exposed to an identical stimulus (back rubbing) plus task (eating), remains motionless. The same 'other dog' cannot walk, sense that his lead is tangled and set about disentangling himself - instead, his approach is to stop and wait for his two legged friend to execute the disentangling. The dog that multi-tasks - eats and wags - on sensing that he is tangled, will endeavour to achieve disentanglement himself. Without the aid of his two legged friend. While continuing to walk. Which dog is which? And what does the ability to multi-task say about which is more intelligent? It has long been cited that women are better at multi-tasking than men. Various hypotheses attempt to answer why this is the case. Perhaps, it is an evolutionary trait - the care, protection, feeding and all round nurturing of the next gene...

Why is it always so much easier to motivate others than yourself? Other than struggling to find the right words to encourage piano practice and homework and bedroom tidying and putting your plates in the dishwasher, I can usually find the right words to motivate others. But although I know what I should be doing,  and know what I want to be doing and why, I find it almost impossible to get down to the elusive it that I need to be doing. The self-directed motivational words blur and disappear. Perhaps because I don't believe them. I stray into a life of procrasti-tidying, procrasti-gardening, procrasti-ironing and procrasti-writing. Today was a fine example - Procrasti-gardening = ball topiary, admiring a wall and pruning climbing roses My 'balls' - 'very satisfying even if part of me is thinking tennis balls, yellow shorts and goggles: minion topiary ... ? I'm not sure if Bertie Baggins agrees with the minion idea The minions/balls sit a...

Roughly (or should that be ruff-ly) 7kg of solid shouty muscle, with teeth, the Jack Russell is a small terrier with a furious 'someone-lit-my-touch-paper-and-I'm-about-to-explode' temper and a belligerent 'you-think-I'm-small!-Tell-that-to-my-face' attitude. We share our home with two not very well behaved but loveable labradors. They are friendly, somewhat lacking in intelligence, funny and gentle. They lie at your feet; lie waiting at the foot of the stairs; lie in doorways; lie anywhere inconvenient and in the way to force some interaction from their human co-habitees; and they also 'lie' about whether or not they've been fed by one of the other human co-habitees. Perhaps, it is all this unexciting idleness that turns some people to the Jack Russell. Variously described as stubborn, energetic and aggressive, this is a working breed used to flush out foxes and definitely not prone to lying around. But why would you want to welcome into your fa...

William Shakespeare - “Words are easy, like the wind; Faithful friends are hard to find.” Friends - noun; plural - 'people' bound by a bond of mutual affection. Origin: Old English freond and German freund , both derived from a common root meaning 'to love.' How many friends do you have? - not social media 'friends,' not work colleagues, not the casual acquaintances you bump into at other friends' parties, not the butcher who asks after the dogs and wonders if they would like a bit of marrow bone, not anyone whose name you sometimes forget, nor anyone whose partner you have never met. A real friend is someone who knows you inside out, who allows you to be an ass at times and doesn't care, who argues against you but never stops loving you, and who is there to listen when you need to be heard. Humans can be fickle and they change as they age, and with change and passing time, friends come and go. This is put rather better by Alexander McCall Smith -...

Cliché - noun :  a word or phrase that has been used so often that it has become annoying. Often regarded as grammatically lazy and revealing of a lack of imagination ... I use them frequently - time after time, in fact. Some clichés, however, are  worth repeating - which undoubtedly promotes their designation as clichés. But if you think about it, a cliché is a cliché precisely because it states something in a succinct, often poetic and memorable way. We hear the words and instantly 'get' their meaning. I like clichés when used sparingly (I suspect a 'sparingly used cliché' is an oxymoron. But I don't care. In my grammatically challenged world, I also like to wantonly split the infinitive. Wanton splitting meaning to split with careless abandon - gulp! What a lot of words. I prefer a lazy economy of vocabulary and moving on from splitting infinitives, if a cliché fits the bill - as that one just did - then I use it. Why not?) Deep in the mire of th...

In life we learn to accept that there are some things that will never happen. And in the life of my family, one of those things is the getting of another puppy. Not while we have two dogs at home already. Not when the big boss thinks that two is a reckless surfeit of canine friends, agreed to only under the influence of a good bottle of red. Not even when puppies are this cute and Littlest " neeeeeeds" another one - But as the cliché goes 'never say never' unless the never refers to something that is either impossible, or that will absolutely never happen. And in the never happening camp are such activities as me paragliding; or base jumping; or doing a parachute jump; or scuba diving; or bungee jumping; or that old oxymoron of enjoying a hot air balloon ride . Risk averse as always, my inner sheep dog is wagging its tail and keeping all feet firmly on the ground. I don't think Littlest would understand if I suggested that there are three dogs ...

We all walk. I walk every day. I also lie. I don't walk every day, as in I don't take the dogs for a walk every day. Poor boys, in this season of tax returns and desperate seeking of extra work and working to pay the tax bill, they are the losers. Four-legged-friend was looking distinctly skinny in his hind legs, when I brushed his coat while he wolfed down his supper this evening (he tries to eat the brush if I take it near him at any other time, so meal times have become grooming times). Oddly, I lose out on the walking too, but this fails to have the same effect on my 'skinniness'... Anyway, we all walk. We walked on Christmas day - Littlest and I walked at the weekend - Slowly. Time to appreciate the trees. Time to encourage the smelly boys into the freezing water. Time for the sun to go down. Time to walk very, very slowly - Littlest's finger phone was engaged throughout in deep discussion with the zoo warden - da...

Autumn and dogs - I have no idea what Four-legged-friend and Bertie Baggins think about the changing seasons. I suspect they think very little, their brains being mere slaves of their stomachs, but if they notice the cooler air, the permanently damp grass and the bare earth in recently ploughed fields, the following thoughts might momentarily elbow past dreams of dinner. Or snacks - 'C'mon, we know that camera is not the only thing you have in your hand.' Autumn is a time for dogs to fine tune their getaway skills - escape scenario: apples all over the ground; apple-gatherer, basket in hand; muzzle sneaked between apple-gatherer's legs and apples snatched in quantities that only just defy death by choking. act dead and extremely heavy when someone needs to access an oven. practice soft-lipped-thievery when helping to pick brambles. partake in sprint training in order to run away effectively when yelled at due to overzealous r...

This is what happens when you find yourself not doing the school-run and think it a good idea to start the day with a brisk walk. And after fifteen minutes realise that a cup of tea was not a sufficient breakfast. We thought that bread was ours! Indignant dogs aside, I really should not have eaten their bread - pocket fluff of indeterminate origin does not taste good and the rest of the walk was spent with an even more loudly protesting come-on-!-you-can't-seriously-tell-me-that-was-all grumbling stomach. Plus the pulling out of bits of thread that had become wedged between my teeth. Before I go on to ' other stories' -  at the top of a field sheltered behind a hedge, we found a circle of twigs and dried grasses. The bed of a family of deer perhaps Or nest of a giant goose (lots of geese on the move today) Or a dragon cushion - sadly Littlest was at school: I'm sure she would have known - probably a fairy something-or-rather. Whatever it was, it...