Kent and critters

 

Today hasn’t been nearly as crummy as I expected after I read the forecast on my six weather apps and the Met Office and BBC weather web sites.  Oh, the weather has been crummy. . . . But apparently my life is not over as a handbell ringer with having successfully lurched through a quarter peal of bob minor on the 3-4.  I keep not having the surplus mental energy to buckle down to Cambridge on handbells, so Niall assigned us . . . which is to say me . . . Kent.  Kent is the standard way station on the road to surprise methods, of which Cambridge is usually the first learnt.  We’d had a stab at Kent before and I’d kind of half-learnt a plain course (maybe only third-learnt).  So I went back to my plain course this week and then out of the blue* frelling Niall emailed me the famous Three Leads of Kent touch.**  Now the point of a touch is that it scrambles the bells’ individual routes through the pattern, so if you’ve been learning the plain course and suddenly you’ve had a touch foisted on you . . . what happens is that one gets superimposed on the other and you can’t ring anything.  I was not looking forward to this afternoon’s meeting.  But . . . by the end of the session*** we were actually getting through to the end of the touch with only occasional gleeps, grunts and groans from yours truly.†

The wind through the kitchen was blowing in the wrong direction or something this evening while I was getting the hellhounds’ supper and the hellterror, incarcerated in her crate, was not going ballistic.  Ballistic is what the hellterror does whenever there seems to be critter food in the offing.  Hellhounds were milling about my feet and demanding dropsies†† which should have been an unmissable clue, but while her eyes were open she was curled up in her bed watching with no more than hey it’s the floor show interest.  This was so unlike her I went over to her crate to check that she was still breathing and wasn’t burning with fever or anything.  She was fine.  Maybe she had a stomachache?  I couldn’t remember seeing her gulping any unknown substance I failed to get away from her today . . . maybe I merely hadn’t seen her swallowing the flowerpot, the umbrella and the (empty) pushchair?

But apparently it was only that the wind was in the wrong direction.  When I turned the heat on under the chicken-and-stock pan and, presumably, the aroma wafted in her direction, she went off like a Guy Fawkes fireworks display, only with a wider variety of sound effects.  I allow moaning, whining and this offended-dowager snort that is perhaps a bullie thing because while all dogs snort, Pavlova is the first one I’ve heard who sounds like Lady Catherine de Bourgh.  I do not allow barking.  Barking causes the Blanket of Restraint to descend from above and engulf the crate.  I don’t know if it’s the dark or the muffling of interesting smells, but this usually quiets her down.  Tonight I was so relieved to have her doing her nut in standard fashion that I just let her get on with it.  By the time she’d woken up to circumstances I was nearly putting hellhounds’ bowls down, which meant I was nearly putting her bowl down, so she didn’t have time to break anything, like the crate or local eardrums.

It’s quiet in here now, the only sounds hellcritter snores and a little background Radio 3.  Maybe I should sing.

* * *

* A phrase that always gives me a little frisson of risk whenever applied in the general vicinity of a computer, prone as the species is to the Blue Screen of Death.

** A plain course has five leads, and is therefore longer than this touch.  Usually a touch is longer than a plain course but there are a few anomalies out there.  The Three Leads of Kent touch is one of them.

*** Which was allowed to run slightly long.  I wasn’t going to choir rehearsal because all the wet roads were going to start freezing after sunset.  Siiiiiiigh.

† Now I have to go back to the dratblasted plain course.

†† Us critter slaves have to derive our amusement where we can.  I have never, ever allowed dogs to mill about my feet while I’m getting their food ready . . . that was before the hellhounds, whose faintest interest in food is to be cossetted and indulged^.  So I now, and for some time, when they’re in the mood, have had two hellhounds who expect me to drop bits of chicken while I’m cutting it up to mix in with their dry kibble, since no dog in his right mind is going to eat dry kibble.^^  This means that as they see my hand moving in a their-ward direction, they put their noses down, because these scraps are dropsies.  After their proper meal, however, as all those dropsie-deprived dogs have done before them, they get two slightly bigger scraps, by sitting and politely taking them out of my hands.

When hellhounds are in Normal Dog Behaviour About Food mode—always very exciting to the downtrodden hellgoddess—as I’m putting the bits and pieces away after supper and hellhounds are still interested, I occasionally give them an intermediate scrap each.  This will be slightly larger than the dropsie morsels but slightly smaller than the official post-meal tidbit.  And as they see my hands moving them-ward . . . their heads start bobbing up and down like those psycho plastic nodding dogs as they try to guess whether this is a dropsie or a sitting-up treat.  I’m too anxious for this Supplementary Food Experience to be positive to let this go on for more than about a second . . . but it’s very entertaining for that second.

^ Not to say nourished.

^^ No one would ever accuse the hellterror of being in her right mind.