Walking The Dog

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...

How to blog when you really can't blog? How to write, when what you want to write, is a secret? How to keep quiet, keep your kids quiet and their friends quiet? Waiting is hard! Social networking silence is harder. But worth it: Littlest marked the occasion with a portrait: We must be mad. Two dogs. Several children. Jobs! We even read to our puppy Walking The Dog or WTD needs to change to WTD s. Maybe. And Four-Legged-Friend's nephew (!) needs a blog name ... nephew-of-FLF or NOFLF little-FLF or LFLF smaller-FLF or SFLF blonde-FLF or BFLF mini-FLF or MFLF I'll-never-be-as-big-as-the-original-FLF or INBABATOFLF I'll-be-boss-of-FLF-one-day or IBBOFLFOD feed-me-weetabix-and-I'm-happy-FLF or FMWAIHFLF doesn't-mum-know-that-five-in-the-morning-in-play-time-FLF or DMKTFITMIPTFLF so-Dad-can-have-his-four-wheeled-mid-life-crisis-now-that-Mum's-got-me-FLF or SDCHHFWMLCNTMGMFLF I-like-a-better-quality-of-newspa...

France shuts for Bastille Day. We on the other hand are very much open for holiday: shopping (the big supermarkets don’t shut on national holidays); eating; swimming, playing tennis; eating; reading; swimming; and eating! Littlest made a holiday plan before we left home – it included “swimming – at least two times every day” (Littlest, being Littlest in her year group at school is not the strongest swimmer, and in school swimming lessons and at the annual swimming gala tends to get rather overwhelmed and over-swum by her friends; improving on holiday is therefore rather essential, especially as she discovered that ‘forgetting your swimming kit’ i.e. leaving it in the car, is no excuse, does not get you out of swimming and means that you borrow an over-large costume from school making the swimming bit even more embarrassing); “do at least eight pages of my holiday homework in France” – lots of maths in a folder titled ‘Four operations’ (this clearly needs some attention – long...

Littlest minus Four-legged-friend equals termination of the "I'm big enough to take him for a walk" attitude. He has other ideas - such as FOOD! and where has that fencing fellow who arrived this morning gone? And have I missed the postman? And did I miss any crumbs under the kitchen table? And might the dishwasher be open? And did I really finish my breakfast - all of it? Littlest plus Four-legged-friend equals all is forgiven