Walking The Dog

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...

Still it snows. And as AA Milne wrote - 'The more it goes (tiddly pom) On snowing Nobody knows (tiddly pom) How cold my toes (tiddly pom) Are growing.' Littlest as Pooh. Littlest with frozen, red toes. Littlest determined (despite the insides of her wellies harbouring sloshy puddles) to go out into the land of snow. To hum (tiddly pom - actually, to sing Castle on a Cloud from Les Mis; something to do with the sweeping?) and work to keep warm - Hat belongs to big brother - he'll never know! Next job - got to keep busy in the cold - is creation of a snowman.  When introduced later, Four-legged-friend clearly thought he could startle Mr Snow into dropping his nose, but so far the barking has failed to gift him the carrot. Rehydration, hot chocolate style. Hot! Followed by a spot of Littlest-squashing, when the snow-ball-rolling got out of control (this is - just to reassure you, a reconstruction of what I witnessed throug...

In the time that it takes to walk Littlest and Four-legged-friend, it might be possible to read a novel, compose an entire symphony, solve the Eurozone crisis, define the underlying difference between the male and female mind - but perhaps I exaggerate, if only a little.The problem is that our Fidlee-diddlee-aye (otherwise known as Littlest) - who declared recently that fiddling with things in her own room was boring - has become a Fiddlee-diddlee-walker. First, it's picking flowers time Then, throwing bread into the stream for Four-legged-friend time (actually, this is not strictly speaking a Fiddlee-diddlee activity, as I was in charge of the bread and we had planned to do this anyway) Climbing trees time follows and hiding in the crop time and 'No, you go under, I go over' time. Next it's 'You can't catch me' time (which hurries us along for a bit, until she starts running in the wrong direction). Almost ...