Robin McKinley's Blog, page 78

Antarctic wedding. With snow. And penguins. And handbells.

 

I had no idea Antarctica was so close, let alone that people got married there.  Why don’t they want to get married in Montevideo or Jakarta?  It’s warmer.  And since my sense of geography is so unreliable, maybe they’re close too.  I probably can’t go, I have this frelling puppy,* but I’m sure Niall and Colin could find a local handbell third.**

But that’s not what happened today.  Today we had dog sleds and pack ice.  Well, nearly.  It’s been mostly unseasonably warm*** the last few weeks and then last night WHAM.  It didn’t quite get down to freezing in my little town garden—which is to say I still have dahlias—but I bet there was a lot of windscreen-scraping in driveways outside of town this morning.  And then there was the wind.  The mad banshee ululation down the chimneys is fine while you’re still in bed, but it’s not popular when you have a lot of livestock to take hurtling.

I’d been planning to wear a skirt—a wool skirt, but still a skirt.  The big disadvantage of ringing handbells for events is that you have to be visible.  And, you know, a wedding.†  But I contemplated the bellowing gale†† and changed my mind.  GOLLY FRELL FREAKING DOODAH was it cold.  And there we are, sinking slowly into the unforgiving mud under the storm-lashed yew trees†††, ringing our handbells in temperatures where if naked flesh made contact with bell metal it would adhere instantly‡ but fortunately I was wearing GLOVES.  I was still freezing to death.  In spite of jeans and long johns.  We rang the beastly bride in and then ran for the car and the car’s HEATER, since we were ringing her both in and out.  Feh.  And, speaking of storm-lashed, they had these little trees in pots by the church door, festive with fairy lights and ribbons, and these kept blowing over, BLAM, first into Niall and then into Colin.  At which point we removed farther under the yew trees.

Our only respite and reprieve was that while it had been a glorious sunny day to begin with it started to cloud over and spit rain—and rain thrown at you by tantruming winds hurts almost as much as hail—while the assembled were heaving themselves out of the mud into the church, and when they (finally) came out again it was seriously trying to rain so they didn’t hang around in the churchyard.  We did get some nice comments, although I could have done without the curious repetition of ‘sweet’.  Sweet?  Sweet?  Arrrrgh.‡‡

Never mind.  Honour was satisfied. No penguins died.  And the puppy crate was clean when I got home.  Yaay.

* * *

* I have a great photo for you of puppy learning to knit and I CAN’T FIND MY CAMERA.  ARRRRGH.  Tomorrow.

** I wonder what ‘bob minor’ is in Spanish or Malay?

*** Which as the human belonging to a new puppy^ I have been very grateful for.  I’m glad she likes inside better than outside during this ghastly pre-sphincter-control phase^^ since I seem to be taking her out kind of a lot^^^ and she thinks indoors is where the FOOOOOOOD is, and also all the best toys, especially the ones that make the hellgoddess drop whatever she is doing and give chase#, accompanying screams of I’M LEAVING YOU IN A BOX BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD optional.

^ Life?  Are you kidding?  I have a puppy

^^ And every time I get it wrong and she pees/craps in her crate I hear Ian Dunbar’s voice telling me that my puppy is ruined, ruined, RUINED FOREVER!!!!  That I have RUINED a perfectly good puppy!!!  That I am GUILTY and a WICKED PERSON!!!!  —I don’t think he’s ever lived with real dogs.  I think it’s a Truman Show set up, although the economics of it seem to me a little obscure.  Personally I’m extremely susceptible to guilt but I’m not going to keep buying dog books that tell me what a hopeless failure I am.  And it’s true that Pavlova is not fed and interacted with on a strict and rigorous basis with a five-star precision rating and a tolerance allowance of five seconds plus or minus+, but she provides her own significant contribution to the general lack of schedule-following and even if I don’t have a life I still have stuff I have to do.  Today that included freezing to death with handbells in my hands.

+ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

^^^ One does forget.  Hellhounds get two medium-length and one short walk by the present system, plus two additional chances to have a quick pee.  But they can get by on two walks a day full stop without any manifestations of anxiety, and if they’re not anxious, I’m not anxious.  And then you get a puppy and all the comfortable verities are trashed, as is your house, your yarn stash, your shoes, the bottoms of your jeans, your hair, your belt, your peace of mind. . . .

# See:  puppy learning to knit.

† A seriously posh wedding, just by the way, which had not been specified to us flunkies in advance.  I haven’t seen so many dead fur-bearing animals together in a small space in a long time.  Although if you’re going to wear dead fur-bearing animal skins, today was a good day to do it.  And I did enjoy watching the stiletto heels trying to walk up the muddy path to the little old church without breaking their ankles.^  I don’t usually have a lot of sympathy for the stiletto-heel brigade^^ but this mud was mean.  It yanked the heel off one of my (flat) leather boots.

^ This is the other problem with ringing handbells at events:  you are visible but so are they.  And I distract easily.

^^ Hayley clearly must be reclaimed

††  And, I don’t know, maybe it contemplated me:  Hey, she’s got dogs.  Let’s wind her up.

††† The huge old yew trees were fabulous, but I wasn’t really in the mood.

‡ It makes a good story, but I don’t think brass gets cold the way aluminium and steel do, does it?  At what temperature will brass stick to skin the way the ice-cube trays of the youth of people as old as I am did?

‡‡ And you sure don’t do it for the money.  Two hours of freezing our butts off for £25 per.

Um.  So, why do we do it?  Well, I think you should have bells for important events.  So if I get asked, I have to say yes.  And handbells are way too underappreciated.

KES, 50

FIFTY

 

I should have had eaten some of Sid’s hash or a piece of the cheese and had a cup of stale floor-sweepings teabag tea with extra sugar before we came out.  I was dangerously short of both calories and caffeine, and hallucinating.

I looked back toward Mr Melmoth.  Who had disappeared.

What?  I looked wildly in both directions.  People don’t just disappear.  He had sprinted down Schmitz or something, or round the corner to the used-books shop.  He looked like he’d escaped off one of the paperback covers in the window anyway.

Hastily I looked back toward Watermelon Shoulders.  At least he hadn’t disappeared.  He’d pulled his cloak back down around him so I couldn’t see his biceps any more although the breadth of shoulders was still evident.  I kept my eyes up and did not check the bottom of his cape for something that wasn’t the point of a sword sticking out.

He smiled, and nodded his head.  I was not going to register that it looked more like a small bow than a nod, any more than I was going to look for the tip of a sword.  At least it was a nice smile.  His teeth were very white.  His face was as black as his clothing.  “Lady,” he said, and turned, and walked away.

Lady?

I wanted to run after him.  I wanted to ask him who he was, who Mr Melmoth was.  I wanted to ask him what had just happened.

I didn’t want to ask him any of these things.  I wanted to forget what had just happened.  I wanted to decide that it had all been a low-blood-sugar incident.  I looked down at my dog.  Sid was standing there idly, like any dog waiting for the human at the other end of the lead to make up her feeble mind about where they were going.  She looked up at me.  Her tail sketched a brief acknowledging wave.  She did not look like a dog that had just faced down a monster out of a fairy tale, or even the local bully . . . oh.  That was it.  That was all it was.  Mr Melmoth was just some creep who’d been mean to her while she was a stray.  (She was no longer a stray, of course.)

That left Watermelon Shoulders to be a low-blood-sugar incident.  Okay.  I could handle it.  We were on our way to the Eatsmobile.  I looked up again.  Watermelon Shoulders had had plenty of time to turn out of my line of sight.  I made it easier by not looking in the direction he had gone.  Besides, he didn’t exist.  Like the poet said.

Last night I saw upon the stair

A little man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away*

I hadn’t noticed the gate beside Eats before but I saw it today:  a black iron gate whose uprights, just now, reminded me a little too much of swords, especially since the bottom ends which stuck down below the crossbars were pointy.  I hesitated briefly, and then firmly put my hand on the latch, which opened at once.  We walked down a short passage between Eats and its neighbor, and then out into a startlingly large (but then I was in an easily startle-able mood) paved courtyard.  It was big enough to have small trees in two unpaved corners, a trellis framing big wooden double doors on the far side of the courtyard, and three large pots swaddled in what looked like a cross between bubble wrap and woolly mufflers standing by the ordinary single-human-sized door into Eats.  One pot contained some unknown shrub covered in new pale-green spring leaves.  The other two pots held rose-bushes.  I liked Eats better and better all the time.

There was one table and one chair.  The table was close to Eats’ door, and an extension cord ran under the door and was draped over the back of the chair.  The chair had a cushion on it.  Since both chair and table were metal, I was grateful.  My nose was already cold, and the rest of me would quickly follow as soon as I stopped moving and the adrenaline spike from what hadn’t happened drained away.  I sat down.  So did Sid.  Reluctantly.  “I know,” I said.  “But you didn’t phone ahead and I wasn’t ready.  I promise we’ll have dinner together indoors.  Hot dinner.”  I hoped.  I wondered if I could bribe Hayley into coming out to Rose Manor again and showing me how to ask Caedmon to burn stuff and get warm.  I wasn’t enthusiastic about the college-dorm-reject stove.

The Eats’ door banged open and Bridget came out carrying a tray.  “Having conversations with your dog already are you—oh!” she said.  She stopped, still holding the tray, staring at Sid.  I looked down at my dog.  Sid was just sitting there.  She was a scrawny, dirty mess, now brutally revealed by daylight, but I didn’t think she looked, you know, surprising.  Maybe I should have told Bridget my inadvertent dog was a stray.  Maybe I hadn’t wanted to admit officially how rash I was being.

“You’ve caught the Phantom,” said Bridget.  “Well, well, well.”

 

*Just in case this poem is no longer recognised as a necessary part of our cultural heritage, which, if so, would be very sad:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigonish_(poem)

 

 

Mastication

 

Pavlova and I had an interesting encounter in the churchyard this morning, with two women and three dogs.  I’m not messing around with dogs I don’t know, and I picked Pavlova up (to her considerable ire).  The woman with the two spaniels, who I’ve seen before, said half in alarm and half in accusation, Where are the whippets?  At home! I said, and she relaxed.  What do they think of this one? she said.  Not a lot, I said.  One of them will put up with her bouncing on him and the other one runs away.*   But by now both women were falling under the spell of Pavlova’s manifest adorableness.  Both said they’d never seen a baby bullie before.  I said hastily (I’m getting kind of used to saying this hastily) she’s a MINI!  She’s not ever going to get really big!  And so we discussed relative sizes for a while, and I said she’d probably weigh about the same as a hellhound**, but she would be short and square.   They said, what’s a bull terrier like, after five whippets/hellhounds in a row?  Hungry, I said.  She is hungry all the time.  It makes a change.  But really . . . she’s like a puppy.  She’s more like a puppy than she’s like some strange unique bull terrier thing, although I’m still kind of worrying that the strange unique bull terrier thing will emerge later.  The one thing I knew I was worrying about was bite inhibition, and even at nine weeks when I got her she already had bull terrier jaws.  But screaming and picking her up seems to be working really well.

The woman with two spaniels stared at me as if I’d grown a second head and it was making rude faces at her.  Bite inhibition? she said cautiously.

Yes, I said.  All puppies bite.  It’s how you teach them not to bite too hard.  Don’t you know about this?  —One of her spaniels was only half grown.

She shook her head.

Ah um, I said.  Well, puppies bite each other, and when the sibling they’re biting cries, the biter backs off.  So you’re kind of pretending to be another puppy.  Picking her up—which her breeder suggested—reinforces that something has happened, since bullies tend to be a bit stubborn and single-minded.***

And it works? said the woman with the half-grown spaniel.

Yes, I said.†  It’s not a perfect system [fortunately I was wearing long sleeves] but it does work.

We went our separate ways (Pavlova instantly shot off after those fascinating other dogs, and it took several bits of kibble to get her pointed in the right direction again) but there’s something that I haven’t seen mentioned in any of the puppy books I’ve read.  This didn’t happen with the hellhounds, probably because they had each other, and furthermore they have never been great munchers of anything.††  But Pavlova would rather bite me than any of her toys††† and I can see her backing off so she can bite me.  In something stubborn, single-minded, prone to the Mad Scampers and twelve weeks old, this seems to me a high level of getting-it-ness.‡

* * *

* I am aware this is not an unusual reaction.  Lots of grown dogs don’t like puppies because they scuttle^ around so in a manic and unpredictable manner.  I understand this.  It’s my attitude toward spiders.

^ All puppies—and some grown up dogs—have a frenzied-dash setting.  It’s not as conspicuous in sighthounds because they’re built to move at extreme speed and pretty much can’t make an ungraceful gesture.  Hazel, the smallest of the previous generation of whippets, used to swap ends while running at top speed, which was a hoot—but it was still beautiful.  Bull terriers have a kind of special take on the frenzied dash which is called hucklebutting.  Southdowner and Olivia say they all do it, it’s just a question of CONTAINMENT.  There are a lot of videos on YouTube of hucklebutting and bullies generally . . . most of it fairly scary, or maybe I’m just clicking on the wrong clips.  Bullies are lovely dogs, given decent genes and a decent upbringing.  It’s not necessary to risk death and the loss of all your worldly goods because you’ve got a hucklebutting bullie.  Anyway.  Pavlova has always dashed around because she’s a puppy, but this last week she’s starting to do proper hucklebutts.  You can see one coming on:  she gets a light in her eye and drops down a level, which is something that none of the videos show properly because they’re taken from human height or at least from above, and she then streaks across the floor—since she only goes out on lead she hasn’t had the chance to try it outside yet—in forty directions at once, belly just about brushing the floor, zigzagging as if she’s dodging sniper bullets.  It’s hilarious.

At the mews the hellhounds are in an open bed—at the cottage downstairs they sleep in their crate, and I can close the door against puppy attack—which I wall off with my knapsack and canvas briefcase to prevent her from getting at them+—but if she plunges past, which she is more likely to at the mews because there’s more open floor space, Darkness moans.++

+ And which, just by the way, is only going to work a week or so longer because she’s getting LARGE ENOUGH TO CLIMB OVER.

++ I thought I was being clever by sending hellhounds upstairs to their favourite bed in my office at the cottage while I strove with the hellterror in the kitchen.  Nope.  Hellhounds muster on the stairs, peering through the banisters . . . and both moan.

Sigh.

Chaos, who is still trying, will stand there—and occasionally lie—while Pavlova climbs all over him at blur speed, as witnessed in those photos a few days ago, but emits quite a complex moan when he Doesn’t Think He Can Bear It A Moment Longer.  Whereupon I remove her.

** I’m telling myself that her feet aren’t very big.  So she’s not going to get enormous.^

^ Of course bullie feet are pretty small, proportionately. . . .

*** But so do sighthounds.  Not so different really.

† I didn’t think of it at the time, but I don’t know how it’s going to work on a half-grown dog who hasn’t been biting his siblings in several months.

†† She says feelingly

††† Note:  sigh.  Although I think it’s also a relationship thing.  Puppies interact by biting.  And again I say:  siiiiiigh.  Couldn’t we have domesticated something to be our fireside companions 40,000 years ago that interacted by tail wagging or bringing flowers and chocolates or something?

‡ It’s still not a perfect system.  I’m glad it’s cold enough to wear long sleeves.

Hellcritters

 

 

My ENTIRE LIFE is about dogs at present.*  That the hellterror can now go for itty bitty walks does make life simpler, but it doesn’t make the time invested any shorter.**  And, furthermore, it is slowly dawning on hellhounds that she’s not going away again and some fairly heavy angst and dismay is being manifested which requires more time in which to provide reassurance.***  And our visitors arrive tomorrow.  I may just pass the puppy around and then tell them to take Peter and go have a nice time doing . . . whatever.

* * *

* With the occasional aberration for bell ringing.^  Tonight was Wild Robert’s Random Wednesday practise and this month it was at Fustian, and aside from a brief desperate and doomed raid on Cambridge minor while there were still only six of us, we rang triples—mostly Grandsire—all night.  There were finally only eight of us and that meant we all had to ring all the time which was great.  And I was not the worst, by a margin of leagues, ringer there and that was better yet.  I did not cover myself with glory^^ but I did not crawl out of the tower bent under a heavy load of humiliation and convinced that my future was in javelin-throwing or cross-stitch^^^ like last time I was at Fustian either.  Yaay.

At one point as we were swapping the fellow who had been ringing the bell I was about to grab# said, that rope is very short.  You may need [to stand on] a box.  —Pardon me, but snork.  He is taller than I am, but I am the one with gorilla-length arms.  That rope was not short.  I had a good four inches spare.  And I am so queen of the jungle.

^ And, uh, work.  I’ve got through to the end of SHADOWS again . . . but I’m still wrestling with some of my editor’s comments.  It’s the same old same old, and I assume it’s especially acute with fantasy because of the whole world-building thing, there’s so much less you can assume everyone knows.  Except you’ve been there for so long some of the stuff seems, you know, normal, like the required Tarot card unit for a standard liberal arts degree and the way you don’t have to wonder whether your blasted pears are ripe yet+ because if they are they will be dancing on your kitchen counter waving tiny flags and shouting in tiny almost inaudible voices, EAT ME!  EAT ME NOW!  And then your first readers all go, hey, what’s with the silver-haired gold-wanded magician on page 364 who cleans up Godom and Somorrah++ single handed but for the assistance of his eight-legged+++ talking horse Fido?   And you’re like, what do you mean, I introduced Dalfgan on page 12, blowing smoke rings while he and Fido engage in waggish dialogue with the local earth spirits.  No you didn’t, say your first readers, and you are suddenly stricken because you remember that you cut the waggish dialogue and Dalfgan seems to have gone with it.  Curses.  So, do you reintroduce Dalfgan, doing something useful like exorcising the village hall of verticillium wilt instead of larking about with earth spirits, or do you cut Godom and Somorrah?  But you really liked the way the evil grand vizier, running away from Dalfgan, or possibly from Fido’s bad jokes, was eaten by that tiger that had appeared in chapter three and you had no idea why.  If you cut Godom and Somorrah you’ll have to cut the tiger, and . . .

I hate rewrites.

+ Arrrrgh.

++ This is fantasy after all

+++ I’m listening to GOTTERDAMMERUNG on Radio 3, although I don’t think Sleipnir comes into it.  I’ve done my rant here before about Brunhilde riding her poor bloody horse into the flames at the end?  You want to die by burning, sugar, which is approximately the worst death going, possibly with the exception of drawing and quartering, you go right ahead.  Leave your horse out of it.  I get totally creeped out every time I happen across that part of the story.  I suppose if the whole world is going up it’s a bit moot, BUT EVEN SO. I don’t think it’s one of Wagner’s clever ideas, is it?  I’ll be here all night if I try to google it to source.  Brunhilde riding Grane into the fire certainly pops up all over the place, not least in the Rackham painting reproduced  on the Gotterdammerung page of Wiki, but I think he was illustrating Wagner.  And you don’t usually get the horse staged, I don’t think, although since I doubt I’ll ever have the stamina to sit through it live, there will be no unfortunate incidents of hissing and popcorn-throwing.

^^ Granted that given my penchant for becoming obsessive about things I’m not very good at I’m not sure I would recognise glory if it introduced itself politely, but then since it would only be asking directions to someone else, I don’t suppose it matters.

^^^ I wouldn’t be any good at these either.  Especially the cross stitch.

# One of the three nosebleed ringers present.  A nosebleed ringer is someone who has attained campanological heights so extreme that the air is dangerously thin.  Also those of us at ground level may get nosebleeds from the strain of tipping our heads back that far to try to bring the distant peaks into focus.  Sigh.  I really do want to ring a little surprise.  A little more than fumbled plain courses of Cambridge minor.  Siiiigh.

** She also continues to be mind-bogglingly the easiest puppy I’ve ever had, as I’ve said here before, and as every (relatively) amiable and (relatively) disaster-free day passes I worry more about adolescence.  Something Has to Go Wrong.  Mind you she is not perfect.  She’s a frelling little paper-shredder, for example, and when she’s been out recently AND DOESN’T FEEL LIKE SETTLING DOWN THANK YOU I take the newspapers out of the crate thus forcing her to play with her TOYS, WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY’RE THERE FOR, YOU FRINKLEDASTED PUPPY?, or, of course, eat her bed.  She’s also coming out of the fearless early-puppy stage and is a little more reactive than she was when she arrived, although I think I’m only noticing because I’m looking for it and it’s NOTHING on the Jekyll and Hyde that was our Chaos at three months.  But for example something set her off at about . . . six o’clock this morning and she barked off and on for a good ten minutes before she decided that the aliens hadn’t landed after all and went back to sleep.  Which made one of us.

Some of the easiness is also merely that I’ve now had Kind of A Lot of Puppies in My Life and with every one you get more used to the drill.  And Darkness and Chaos were only six years ago.  But for example . . . I’ve had puppies that were NIGHTMARES about learning to go on lead, and puppies that were ho hum no big deal.  Because both Southdowner and Olivia had warned me that you don’t EVER want to get into a collision of wills with a bull terrier I was expecting lead training to be a trifle exciting, and of course it could still go in that direction, but I’ve been putting Pavlova on lead pretty much every time she goes outside, even in the tiny cottage garden, just so she’s used to the idea.  Now that we’re going Out into the World while we have our occasional difference of opinion^ nine times out of ten if I bend down, hold a bit of kibble and call her [call] name she’s more than happy to sprint in my direction, and then, usually, I can convince her to keep going that way.  She is such a cheerful little creature.

^ Whereupon I pick her up and tuck her under my arm and we go where I want to go.  Obviously we have to reach an understanding about this before she gets too big for this ploy.

*** You are my darling and adorable and much-loved hellhounds!  And you could eat supper, you know!

It’s the little things

 

We have visitors over the weekend, and they suggested we go out for dinner Friday night.  Friday night even in the back woods of Hampshire in October is likely to fill up anywhere anyone would want to eat at, so having ascertained how many of us there were likely to be I attempted to ring up to make a booking.  I was hampered in this effort by the fact that the last time we went to our previous favourite local gastropub they were rather a cow about Luke in his wheelchair.  I’d made that booking ahead too, and said that one of us was in a wheelchair, and they’d said that was fine.  On the night however I had the distinct feeling that we were being viewed as causing trouble.  Excuse me?  Their preparations consisted of putting a ‘reserved’ tag on a ground-floor table—they hadn’t even removed the superfluous chair.  Nor were they particularly gracious about doing it after we arrived.  And . . . it’s the sort of pub where the food’s all on a chalkboard and you have to get up from your table and go read it.  The chalkboard is up a half flight of stairs.  Nobody offered to read it for us.  Recollect that I’d made the booking in advance, ALERTING them to the fact of a wheelchair.  And nobody could be frelling bothered to write out the menu on a piece of paper?  Well I don’t think we can be frelling bothered to go back there.

Peter and I don’t eat out much so we’re out of the loop.  Rumour has it that both the Six Legged Pony and the Rugby Scrum have acquired new management and more to the point new cooks, but the improvement would have to be almost unencompassably vast, like the Bowery street vendor I used to buy hot pretzels from when I lived on Staten Island and was coming over on the ferry, taking on the Petrie Court Café and Wine Bar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and earning a couple of Michelin stars.  I’m not really enthusiastic about putting my digestion and our visitors’ digestion* on the line to find out, either.  So I thought I’d play it relatively safe and try to get us in at the Bard and Orpharion, where Peter and I used to go occasionally when I still had more than about three calories’ slack in the daily budget.**

We haven’t been there since the advent of Pooka so the phone number is not in my iPhone contacts list.  So, you look it up in the phone book, right?  It’s a pub.  It wants people to come there and buy things to eat and drink.  Right?  It’ll be in the phone book.

We have three local phone books:  the big local, the little local, and the highlights.  I couldn’t find it listed in any of them, under pubs, restaurants, restaurants general, public houses, pub food, hotels and inns (it also has bedrooms), menu guide, English food, elephant hire or washing machine repair.  Nor was it in the white pages of any of these.  Eventually the amount of noise I was making brought Peter to my side, bearing cold compresses***.  And he looked for it in all these places† and failed to find it either. ††

Now it’s perfectly true that at least one of my computers is on all the time and that I take both Pooka and Astarte the iPad to bed with me.†††  But I object to the idea of looking up a frelling landline phone number on line.  But whatever.  Okay.  And there the Bard was, with a shiny flashy web site with a lot of revolving frelling video sensitively fading in and out GO AWAY YOU’RE IRRITATING ME.  The phone number is tucked away almost invisible behind a frond of hyperactive graphic art.

But at least it was there.  I pulled Peter’s elderly cheap still-plugged-into-the-wall phone toward me and punched‡ in the numbers.  The phone rang.  And rang.  And rang.  And rang.  And rang.  And rang.  And rang.  And rang.  I’m tired of typing ‘and rang.’  EVENTUALLY there was a click at the other end and a robot voice said, your call cannot be connected at this time.

Followed by dead air.  No nonsense like thank you for calling, we apologise for missing your call, please leave a message and we’ll get back to you (which a lot of restaurants do), please ring at the following times, please go hire an elephant and leave us alone.  Nope.  Nothing.

I went back to the web site, found their email address, and wrote them an email.  It was not friendly.  It expressed surprise that, given their manifest customer relations and communication skills, they had any customers, and adding that they certainly weren’t going to have me, my husband, and our visitors.

Meanwhile we still don’t have a booking for Friday night.

* * *

* Peter can eat ANYTHING.  This has been a source of marital friction, not to say snarling, for almost twenty-one years.  At least he knows what good food is and objects to wasting time and money on bad.

** THREE?  No, no, not three.  Maybe one and a half.  Put that carrot stick down.

*** And chains, in case the cold compresses didn’t work.

† I think he added plumbing supplies and house removals^, not necessarily because it was likely to be found in either but because there were lots of pages to look through so it gave us a spurious sense of actively seeking our goal.

^ Which standard British phrase I still love after twenty-one years of seeing it in the phone book.  It means house contents movers, you know?  But I really want to see them remove a house.

†† He did notice a very good two for one deal on elephant hire with free balloons.

††† I also take my knitting, about forty-three books, and several years of back journal issues, mostly homeopathy and gardening.  And occasionally some dogs.

‡ It’s not that old.  I bought him an old, reconditioned, They Made Things to Last in Those Days indestructible rotary phone a few years ago because it amused me.  It broke.

First Walk

 

It’s been a day full of exciting adventures.  First and foremost DURANCE VILE IS OFFICIALLY OVER.  LET THE HURTLING BEGIN.  Since we only had a few minutes* because I wanted to be able to put her down for a another few minutes elsewhere today, I carried her to the churchyard this morning and set her down . . . and watched her react to the realisation that The World Is a Very Big Place.  Very.  Big.  Especially when you’re only about six inches at the shoulder.**

And we went bell ringing again tonight at South Desuetude and those stairs aren’t getting any shorter and Pavlova is not getting any lighter, but Niall carried the crate for me.  I bought him a beer at the pub***, where Pavlova was a star.  I’d warned poor Niall that while I was happy to drive and give him a lift, I was bringing the hellterror and that I was furthermore positively going to stop at the Phlogiston Arms on the way back because they allow dogs and I could Show the Puppy More Stuff.  Also, they brew their own beer, which is excellent.

I think she’s getting bored with bell ringing, since no one ever offers to teach her.  Oh, this again, she says, puts her paws over her ears and goes to sleep.  But she woke up for the pub, where it turned out the bar maid loooooooooves bull terriers, and told rather alarming stories of the gigantic brindle bullie bitch of her childhood, who had the bullie joie de vivre and an awful lot of weight to throw it around with.  Pavlova is a MINI! I said, perhaps a little desperately.  She also said there is a gigantic genial brindle male bullie who comes to the pub upon occasion (trailing humans, as dogs are usually expected to do).  Pavlova and I may have to investigate.  Tonight there was a yellow lab I have seen before, who is about the size of a bull mastiff crossed with an SUV, but friendly.  He sauntered up to Pavlova who was, at that point, having a slight moment of insecurity about things—it was pretty noisy in the pub, and she had met a lot of new best friends in the last few minutes—but as soon as he raised his shovel-sized head toward her as she sat in my lap I could feel her tail start to go.  WhapwhapwhapwhapwhapwhapwhapwhapWHAP. 

Katinseattle

Ears UP, I notice. And a very attractive feature they prove. They have that adorable slightly-too-big-for-the-rest-of-the-puppy look.

Southdowner says they’ll flop back down again when she hits teething.  They’re not actually what you’d call hard up even now.  But I have mixed feelings about her ears.  Aside from the question of how big she’s going to get because her ears have come up slowly, if they don’t come up perfectly then we’re let off the dog show question.  Southdowner said when she was down here last Sunday week that Pav is still the pattern-card of bullie puppy perfection.  Oh dear.  I think a nice small harmless design fault might be in order.†

Catherine

just look at the little, pink puppy tummy!

I adore the little pink puppy tummy.  I am extremely fond of dog tummies generally, when they belong to dogs who want their them rubbed.  Sighthounds with their dramatic undercarriage are a little more challenging a rub than the standard issue, but you learn to adjust.  The best thing about Pavlova is that she’s a girl.  Not that I wouldn’t have been just as besotted with Fruitcake if I’d ended up with him . . . but there’s all that tummy on a girl.

Diane in MN

So, remind me . . . what’s the bright idea about THREE dogs?

Been there, done that, it’s all heart and gut, no matter what the brain provides as reasons. It’s why I don’t go out of my way to look at puppies.

Birmingham is only two and something hours away by train.  And another two and something coming back.  That’s not going out of my way, is it?

Illumina

Thanks to your blog, I now find myself ogling bull terriers in the street. I saw two … today, one white, one brindle. I wanted to go and give them a cuddle … but realised just in time that the owner might, at the very least, give me strange looks.

Well you certainly have to ask before you fall on someone else’s dog(s) with arms outstretched and cries of gladness, but most owners would be delighted.  Want to get on someone’s good side?  Want to make a blindly loyal friend for life?  Make a fuss over their dog(s).

Rainycity1

She is, furthermore, starting to respond to Little Fat Thing. Oops.

I don’t suppose you’d consider transitioning her call name to Elefti, by any chance?

You know, ‘LFT’….

It sounds like a character in one of Kes’ books.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Aldetruda has a friend named Elefti.  She kicks ass, of course.

Diane in MN

I’ve found that puppies generally start sleeping through the night at ten or eleven weeks. I hope Pavlova reaches this milestone soon.

SHE REACHED IT THE DAY BEFORE HER BOWELS MUTINIED.  At the moment I have no clue . . . and I’m cleaning out various crates rather a lot and I’m not in a good mood.

B_twin_1

Toni wrote:

             Well, we still call our puppy Baby . . . it has been two years, so I’m beginning to think that’s probably her name now.

Well, Brighid and Bramble are still “the pups” at age 3.

I guess there are a lot of us around.  In the last generation Holly and Hazel were ‘the pups’ all their lives.  And I think Rowan was born a grande dame.

Rainycity1

She can hardly pee fast enough to rush back and get her bit of kibble. In fact I suspect that sometimes the reason she has to pee again so soon is because she cut the first one short because she was HUNGRY.

You don’t think it’s just because she wants more kibble?

????  Why isn’t this what I said?

Diane in MN

It would be nice if puppies got solid sphincter control at about the same time as they figured out what outdoors is for, but it’s never happened that way with any puppy I’ve known.

ARRRRRRRRGH.  See above.  Also, despite the number of dogs that frolic through the churchyard†† Pavlova did not pee . . . in our churchyard, in South Desuetude’s, or in the meadow behind the pub.  No, she had to get back home to her garden.  Or her crate, of course, with the endless supply of freshly changed newspapers.  Siiiiiiiiiiigh.

Giboppmar

I have 2yo husky mix, myself, and this brings back all sorts of [repressed] memories of those horrible and yet sweet first few weeks.

Ha.  Horrible and yet sweet.  And repressed.  Yes.  Exactly.  As I’ve said for some reason several times recently, baby things are adorable so we don’t kill them.  Little pink puppy tummies are an evolutionary survival mechanism.  ARRRRRRGH.

3rdragon

. . . The upshot of all these numbers is that yes, whippets are considerably faster than cheetahs, pound-for-pound. If you had a 100lb whippet that maintained the speed-to-weight ratio, a cheetah-sized whippet would have a top speed of approximately 140mph, which, incidentally, is fast enough to be a federal offense on many US highways.

SNORK.

* * *

* Ten lousy minutes!  Ten minutes!  I can add five minutes a month to walk time.  ARRRRGH.  So there is still a lot of hanging on the other end of frayed cotton ropes and creatively shaped rubber and plastic objects and hot pink snugga wubbas^ in my immediate future.^^

^ http://www.kongcompany.com/products/for-dogs/wubba/wubba/snugga-wubba/

^^ And by the time she’s ten years old we’ll be walking ten hours a day. + Hmm.  I assume you get to stop adding five minutes a month at some point.

+ Or nine hours and fifty-five minutes.  Because we’re starting with ten minutes at three months.  Or something.

** One of those hard crusty blokes that you surreptitiously look around to check if there’s anyone else nearby as he walks toward you, stopped and looked at Pavlova.  His face lit up and he said, Oh!  A bull terrier puppy!  An English bull terrier!  They are wonderful dogs!

*** not necessarily because he carried the crate, but it didn’t hurt.

† I don’t think slightly frilly ears are going to save me from breeding her however if she goes on as she’s begun.  I know, I know, I’m besotted, but she is at least nearly a pattern-card of physical perfection, and she really does have the kind of personality you want to keep in the gene pool.

†† Rant alert:  I cannot BELIEVE the amount of dog crap in the churchyard.  What is the MATTER with people.  It’s bad enough to be an utter beneath contempt turd in public spaces generally^ but in a CHURCHYARD??????  I don’t care what your dinglebrained private beliefs are, you can jolly well fricking respect other people’s.  Not to mention people who want a nice amble around a pretty churchyard with romantic old stones in it, and maybe sit on the grass for a picnic . . .  ewwwwwwww.

^ And some modest allowance does have to be made for the way crap can go invisible on you, especially this time of year when there are a lot of crap-coloured leaves around, especially when your more-than-one dog decide(s) to crap simultaneously at opposite ends of their long extending leads.  Also, if you happen to have a dog that likes to stroll while he’s defecating, you’re never perfectly sure you got all of it.  Especially if there’s long grass involved.+

+ HATE long grass.  HAAAAAAATE. 

Oh the adorable . . .

 

WELL SORT OF.  NOW THE LITTLE PERISHER IS CONSTIPATED.  ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.  So I’ve been taking her outdoors and running her around, and she Assumes the Position and then . . . nothing happens.  ARRRRRRRRRGH.  So just now we were having a magnificent battle over a an ex-ball of twine*, and she stopped suddenly, and with that seamless meld of one activity into another that puppies do so well, crapped on the FLOOR.  OKAY MR RUIN-YOUR-PUPPY KNOW-ALL DOG-TRAINER CREEP, WHAT’S YOUR MAGIC FORMULA FOR RECOVERING FROM DIARRHOEA VIA CONSTIPATION?  OH, NO, WAIT, IF I WERE A GOOD PUPPY OWNER SHE WOULDN’T (A) HAVE GOT DIARRHOEA AND THEREFORE (B) BOOMERANG CONSTIPATION WOULD NOT BE AN ISSUE.  OR, AS YOU MIGHT SAY, A NON ISSUE.  Meanwhile, there is no doubt that our house-training has taken a gigantic leap backwards, but, you know, somehow I think we’ll all recover.  Just not on schedule.

Meanwhile.  I promised you a photo blog tonight.**

These first three are from last Sunday. This is one of Pavlova’s aunties, Mississippi Mud Pie. Missy for short.

 

Are we too cute? Yes, we are too cute.

 

That is Southdowner, by the way, mostly off screen, offering CHEESE.

 

AWWWWWWWWW. Lap time.

 

Yes you are going to lie there quietly. Because I say so, and I am the hellgoddess.

AWWWWWWWWWW revisited. Also, BIGGER.

 

I would never have believed Chaos as the patient uncle if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

 

Note puppy blur. She’s moving faster than the lens can snap. Also, I couldn’t make up my mind about whether to set the light for indoor or outdoor since there are both involved here. The kitchen floor is about the right colour, as is Pavlova, but Chaos is much more fawn and not so silver.

 

PLAAAAAAAAY WITH MEEEEEE PLEEEEEEEZ I ADOOOOOOOOORE YOU.

 

The funny thing is that Chaos gets out of the hellhound bed of his own accord and then stands there being hammered by a puppy, looking more and more miserable. Eventually I pick her up and let him escape.

I guess we’re going to keep her.

* * *

* Kittens and yarn?  Let me tell you about puppies and twine.

** Not that I can be trusted about these things.   You are warned.

REMIND ME WHY I THOUGHT I WANTED DOGS

 

 

Okay, maybe one dog.  I can understand how someone foolish enough to go look at a litter of by-definition-adorable little fat darling-pawed baby puppies might continue to have lost their grip long enough to agree to take one away when it gets older and develops a dangerous curiosity about the world and a resistance to containment and quiet reflection.  But between the time you saw the things, and took subconscious note of the breeder surreptitiously doing a quick mop-up when they thought you weren’t looking, and, equally subconsciously, registered the funny stains on the mottled tweed indoor-outdoor carpet and the curiously fringed effect of any local woodwork—and possibly had some direct experience of winsome little baby puppy little needle teeth, you would think they would at least STOP THERE.  You want the warm furry critter breathing effect in your life, okay, one dog.  ONE dog is plenty.

Two?  Okay, two is over the line.  There is no excuse for two.  But you may have told yourself, they’ll keep each other company, and if you’re walking one dog anyway, why not two?

BUT THREE.  THERE IS REALLY NO EXCUSE FOR THREE.

Pavlova has been delightfully afflicted by the runs.  And I don’t mean what puppies do from one end of your sitting room to the other.*  She’s been a little off in the gut department since her final jab last Tuesday, but in the first place I know this happens and in the second place I’m kind of hardened, you should forgive the term, on the subject of canine effluvia, having had the ultra-graphic experience of hellhounds.  So we were a little on the loose side, now and then, eh, it’s raining a lot, what I can’t pick up effectively goes away.

And then Thursday was a little alarming.  Okay, I said to Pavlova, if you haven’t sorted by tomorrow, I’ll take you to the vet.

YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE CONDITION OF PAVLOVA’S CRATE WHEN I OPENED HER UP FRIDAY MORNING.

::Robin freaks out::

I rang the vet.  The vets were all out on emergency calls.  Come to the afternoon surgery, said the receptionist.  THE AFTERNOON SURGERY?  THAT’S FOUR HOURS AWAY.

::Robin continues to freak out::

Robin also spends most of an hour dismantling the frelling crate—this one is from before the days of snap-fastenings, and it’s held together by screws—and scrubbing it within two microns of its life.  Then hosing down the bedding and putting it on to soak in biological washing powder before putting it in the washing machine on BOIL.  Pavlova, in the meanwhile, apparently entirely cheerful about life except for the non-arrival of breakfast and the fact that I’ve locked her out of the hellhound crate again, is massively underfoot as only a hyperactive under-ten-pound puppy can be.  ARRRRRGH.**

Finally time for the surgery.***  And she charms the, er, crap out of the vet*** who, having seen me through two generations of whippety dogs, comments that she’s a little out of my usual way.†  He concurs that the present unlovely situation is probably the result of the jab, she looks fine aside from the evidence to the contrary in the clinic’s back room where someone in a hazmat overall is dealing with her crate, and she’s not sore or swollen anywhere.  He sends me home with some puppy sticky-up paste, gives me a tin of wet food for delicate tummies and says take her off her puppy chow, nothing but chicken and rice.

I keep forgetting that she LOOOOOOOOOOOOVES food, that the diet change is not going to be a problem from her, ahem, end.  Plain bland unspeakably boring chicken and white rice?  Great.  Bring it on.  So-called ‘palatable’ sticky-up paste, which the hellhounds used to spit out again with gratuitous emphasis?  Delicious.  One of the interesting little side effects of the present regime is . . . trying to reward her when she pees/craps outdoors.  She knows she’s supposed to get a treat, and she sprints back to me and asks for it.  Um.  So I’m presently keeping a spoonful of the tin-contents by the back door, and breaking off a splodge of it.  It is a credit to her comprehension of the whole bite-inhibition thing that I haven’t lost any attached bits, although I tend to be puppy-drool to the wrist by the time she’s sure she hasn’t missed anything.††

And she’s still . . . well, not exactly squirting.  We’re gaining on the problem, although we haven’t quite caught up with it yet.  Both Peter’s and my washing machines are tired.  So, remind me . . . what’s the bright idea about THREE dogs?†††

* * *

* Or at least I hope they don’t do it from one end of your sitting room to the other.

** By this time of course I’d convinced myself that I was an evil, stupid, neglectful owner and she was going to die on the operating table.  But she’s been bright-eyed, waggy-tailed, ominous-discharge-free^, pestilentially lively and HUNGRY right along.  And the squirts were erratic:  she’d be fine, and then she’d squirt, and then she’d be fine.  I guessed maybe she was ingesting more rotten, fermented apple before I got it away from her—both Peter and I have apple trees—than I thought.

^ Aside from the, ahem, obvious.  But she wasn’t dribbling mucus out of any orifices.  If she had been I’d’ve had her to the vet’s fast, whiplash optional.

*** Aaaaaaaand on the way she had a mega-squirt in her tiny travelling crate.  JOY.  The people at the clinic said, here, you take the puppy, we’ll take care of this, and I thought wow, here’s service.  But then they assumed I’d want to throw away the bedding.  WHAT?  If I’d thrown out everything a dog had ever erupted on the hellhounds would have bankrupted me.^  I said put it in a plastic bag, I’ll deal with it.  And when I got home I found out that while they’d given me the mucky towel they’d thrown away her favourite toy.  WTF, guys?  The purpose of solid plastic toys is that THEY ARE WASHABLE.  I can’t afford to replace every frelling toy either.  That’s why the washable ones go in the crate with the always-potentially-erupting dog.  Good GRIEF. 

^ They had a jolly good try anyway.

*** In the grateful for medium-sized favours category, Pavlova has an uncanny ability to keep herself clean.  She came out of her inexpressibly revolting crate Friday morning clean, and out of her too-small-for-this travelling crate clean too.  And I am grateful.  Dogs are usually mad at you for weeks after you’ve put them through the BOIL setting on the washing machine, and I don’t like doing any more high-power-usage loads than I have to anyway.

† I saw a brindle mini bull terrier in town this morning!!!!!!!  I was with hellhounds at the time so I didn’t go racing up to the owner to ask breathless questions about life with a hellterror, but I’m thinking of asking the vet if either of the other two bullies on their books have humans who might be willing to talk to a green bullie owner, and if so to give them my phone number and ask them to give me a call.

†† I don’t want to use straight chicken which seems to me extreme for the purpose.  Chicken is, well, chicken.  You get crumbs of it mixed up in your rice, or your cereal-free kibble, depending.

††† Um, melting oodgy-goodgy adorableness?  There should be a photo blog tomorrow.  Guaranteed incredible cuteness.  Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, you won’t believe your eyes. . . .

KES, 49

FORTY NINE

 

We stopped long enough for Sid to have a pee (while I looked nervously over my shoulder toward the Friendly Campfire office) and then crossed Sir Alexander Dane Avenue to walk down Bradbury toward the Eatsmobile.  Sid trotted along beside me like being on heel was her natural condition.  The blue sky was disappearing behind an assortment of clouds that if you were lying on your back in a field with nothing to worry about but making it indoors again if it’s blowing into a storm would be great to watch, and if you’re shortly to be moving all your worldly goods from the back of a van up a steep flight of stairs to your new house you don’t like at all.  I wasn’t looking where we were going.  I was looking up at the sky.

Sid turned in front of me, stopped and growled.  I yanked my attention back down to street level:  oh major crapfest, I don’t need this, whatever it is.  There was a tall—a very tall—man standing on the sidewalk at the end of the block, where we needed to cross Schmitz to Eats.  He was apparently just standing there.  Facing us.  He seemed to be dressed entirely in black, including a broad-brimmed black hat that left his face in shadow:  even so his skin seemed remarkably pale.

I could also see that he was smiling.  It was not a hi, how are you, nice day smile.  It was a breakfast has arrived and it’s so much more fun when it tries to get away smile.

Hey, it’s daylight.  Couldn’t be a vampire.  Ha ha ha ha ha.  Evidently I’ve read too many of my own novels.

I would probably have noticed this guy even if he wasn’t doing his Black Knight at the Ford trick at the crossroads to the Eatsmobile, because he was so tall and so dramatically dressed.  But having him standing there looking like he was about to challenge me to a duel while my new dog stood leaning against my legs like a Seeing Eye dog preventing her charge from walking into the bottomless ravine was seriously unsettling.

He took a step forward.  The hem of his long coat swirled.  Sid’s growl went from sotto voce to definitely out loud.  I reached down and grabbed her harness.  My scarf was certainly not up for this.  I wasn’t sure my belt was either.  I knew I wasn’t.  I didn’t have to reach very far:  Sid was at full alert and standing on her tippy toes.  You know how even a small dog can get very heavy when it wants to?  Fifty pounds of heavy dog and I wasn’t going anywhere.

At the same time . . . Mr Melmoth did not look like someone who was going to be very impressed by a fifty-pound dog or anything else.  And this aside from the fact that any dog that bit any human was immediately in the wrong and I with less than twenty-four hours’ experience of Sid—and a harness made out of a belt?  We were so not presenting as solid citizens.  I took a better grip on said harness and prepared to try to drag her into the street as Mr Melmoth got closer.  Part of my mind was saying frantically, What do you really think is going on?  This is a normal small American town on a normal morning in the normal world.  This has nothing to do with Flowerhair or Aldetruda or Ilyssa or any of your other mad heroines out of books!  This was not the part of my mind that was winning.  Mr Melmoth took another step toward us.  He was smiling more broadly, possibly at our flusteredness.  Well, my flusteredness.  Sid was not flustered.  Sid was focussed.

There was a noise just beside us, in the street I was dragging Sid toward.  I stopped.  I may have whimpered.  Sid glanced toward the street, and then stood up even taller, but not in a we’re-being-outflanked way, in an oh-good-reinforcements way.  Mr Melmoth had stopped.  He had also stopped smiling.  I risked a look to my right, into the street.

And there was another tall man.  Another tall man dressed all in black.

But this one made Mr Melmoth look small and wimpy.  My new champion—well, Sid’s new champion—wasn’t a lot taller than Mr Melmoth, but he was a lot broader.  He was wearing a cloak, for pity’s sake, and it was folded back on this side, so I could see the shoulder the size of a well-grown watermelon and biceps bigger around than my waist.  And that was not a swordbelt.  That was not a swordbelt.  He was dressed in black clothing, and the clouds scudding overhead were throwing a lot of very strange shadows around.  That was all it was.  Whatever it was.  I don’t have any idea why he was holding his left arm out a little to one side so he could get his right hand under it to rest on something that seemed to hang at hip level . . . but it had nothing to do with a sword.

Nothing.

Magnificapuppy

 

 

Pavlova made it through the night last night dry for the first time.  YAAAAAAAAAY.  I’m well aware that this doesn’t mean there is no more cage (or floor*) cleaning in my future but it made this morning that little bit brighter.**

I’m rapidly rolling into the Utterly Besotted phase—you thought I was there already?  You poor silly people—so I should probably have a Puppy Moratorium Night here soon.***  Everybody thinks their own beloved someone or other is unusually special.  But . . . Pavlova is.  No, really.  No . . . REALLY.  Stop that laughing.  Because worry is my natural state I’m starting to worry that when she hits teething or adolescence her inner 666† will emerge so I’d better enjoy the halcyon baby puppy days while I can, even if there are a lot of disgusting newspapers and mopping up involved.  But for example:  one of the few things I had been genuinely worrying about is that when we’re playing and she misses and nips me FRELLING FRELLING FRELLING FRELLING THOSE MAY BE BABY TEETH BUT THEY’RE ALREADY IN A BULL TERRIER JAW.  FRELLING.  Also, blood.  The hellhounds, who are not great chompers anyway††, were easily taught bite inhibition:  in the first place, they had each other, and so when I cried like a puppy if one of them bit me too hard, they backed off instantly.  Easy peasy.  And they never drew blood in the first place.  Pavlova . . . I was getting on for being swathed in bandages from the wrists down.  And I asked Southdowner.  She said two things:  first, let her mouth me gently, so she knows the difference, and then if she nips too hard, scream and pick her up so she recognises that play has been interrupted.  I’d been screaming, rather less voluntarily than with the hellhounds, and this had obviously worried her but I’m not sure she was quite making the connection.

So.  While I wouldn’t want to rely on it—and teething and adolescence and 666 are still in our future—but in a week’s time I’ve gone from bracing myself when I play with her to letting her chew me (gently) because she’s figured it out.  I’ve read the dog training books that say you mustn’t let your puppy so much as touch you with his teeth and this has seemed to me absurd as well as a big frelling nuisance.  But this is also the sort of thing why I haven’t wanted to tackle something like a bull terrier with those jaws and that fighting-dog heritage.  Maybe you really can’t let your bull terrier touch you with his or her teeth, in which case I’d better not have one because I’m too slapdash.

Southdowner and Olivia had also warned me (repeatedly) that bullies are the most stubborn and single-minded creatures on the planet, and that if you remove a bull terrier from something that interests him or her, the minute you let go it’ll be straight back to the scene of the crime.  Um.  No.  Pavlova is still managing to eat more rotten apple bits than I am happy about, but when I pick her up and put her down in a different part of the garden it’s just oh well, humans are such control freaks, and she trots off cheerfully to try to fall in the pond or eat the smoke bush (which is about ten foot square).

Maybe she’s not really a bull terrier.  That could explain a lot.

* * *

* Of course by the standards of a certain dog trainer who will not be named, the fact of ACCIDENTS means that I have ruined my puppy forever.  Well, I’m not so perfect either, we’ll probably get along better this way.  But I don’t know how you’re supposed not to have a few accidents out here in the real world.  She isn’t even allowed to run around unsupervised—none of the houses involved in the McKinley-Dickinson ménage is really capable of being puppy proofed, and in the great scheme of things puppyhood doesn’t last all that long although it may feel like it sometimes and you don’t really want to put up major anti-puppy emplacements, all that cement and steel is depressing and no good for your hardwood floors.  So when she’s out looking for havoc and mayhem (and Darkness and Chaos) I’m watching her.  In theory I’m watching her all the time.  In practise I may wash a few dishes and stuff a few pairs of All Stars back under the glass-fronted bookshelf which stands by the front door at the cottage and which I have forgiven for the lack of that bottom shelf because the All-Stars space is useful, and throw out a few truly elderly magazines which now I also have KNITTING magazines to read I probably never will get back to.^  And it doesn’t take a puppy long to pee/crap.  The thing that brands me as a Bad Puppy-Ruining Dog Owner however is that in both cases she did it in front of the back door—the door I should have been there to open for her—and which would furthermore mean, had all gone to Perfect Puppy Trainer Plan, she would have been rewarded for.  The joys of a food-oriented dog.  She can hardly pee fast enough to rush back and get her bit of kibble.  In fact I suspect that sometimes the reason she has to pee again so soon is because she cut the first one short because she was HUNGRY.

But the point remains.  People are human.  And so are, um, puppies.

^ I was buying petrol the other day, at the garage in Warm Upford I’ve been going to since I moved over here+, and I was talking to Filbert, who I have been seeing at that garage since I moved over here.  We were talking about the weather, because that’s what you do in England, and which hasn’t been very friendly lately.++  We’d had the kind of wind that makes the eaves scream and the puppy bark and there not being enough pillows to drown it all out the night before.  Filbert said, Remember that huge storm that knocked all the trees down?  Memories of uprooted giant beech trees everywhere—leaving shocking craters of white Hampshire chalk—came immediately to my mind and I said, with complete conviction, Yes.  He said, it’s twenty-five years ago—it was 1987.  At which point I was too embarrassed to say . . . erm.  Actually I didn’t get here till October of ’91.  I have never been much good about time.+++  Well, I think some of those magazines are from ’87.

+ And which, let us not forget, discovered the mysterious misbehaving  gurglehampfrod that no one would look for on a VW Golf because VW Golfs don’t have them, which was preventing Wolfgang starting reliably.

++ Not merely torrential rain but yesterday hail big enough to hurt while hellhounds and I were out attempting to hurtle.

+++ Peter yelps as if bitten# when he reads this sentence.  He likes things to happen to a schedule and that schedule to be adhered to.  Poor man.

# Or hit by yesterday’s hail

** I emailed Southdowner and Olivia last night that I AM NOT CLEANING UP AFTER AN ENTIRE FRELLING LITTER OF PUPPIES^ and if anyone has an urgency about getting a litter out of Pavlova she is going to have to move down here for two or three months.^^

^ I have.  But I was younger.

^^ And then we can both be in floods of tears when our first puppy goes to its new home.

*** KES tomorrow.  That’ll do it.  I was going to run a KES tonight but clearly I had to tell you about Pavlova’s triumph.  Um . . .

† Scone, in this litter.  Olivia is wondering who she dares sell her to.  She doesn’t want to cope.

†† Especially not of food.