Even more vets

 

I got lost today too.  Yawn.  I’m so predictable.

I knew I would get lost yesterday—that’s why I brought Peter, to scrape me off the roof of the car, muffle my screams and find someone to ask directions—but that vet is over in darkest Suffix, for heaven’s sake, where you can drive for miles without ever seeing anything but sheep, trees and the occasional motorway overpass.  Today’s vet is only in Steep Dribbling, where I’ve been several times to ring bells*, although it’s out of my usual range.  Steep Dribbling is small.  It has a church, two pubs, an actual functioning village post office which makes it rare and favoured, and the widget factory.  It’s a very top end widget factory—these are not your cheap everyday plastic widgets—and it has grounds.  You can’t even see the factory from the road, only the lavish swirl of drive** and more trees (no sheep though).  It’s just that once you’ve taken over your small village to build your widget factory, there’s not a lot of village left.  To get lost in.  I managed.

The British habit of burying entire small city-states behind the confusing nomenclature of ‘industrial estate’ is not popular with me, multiple-PhD-holder in the Art of Getting Lost that I am.***  At least when the street address includes ‘Unit 5617’—as it was concerning a yarn shop Fiona and I visited not too long ago—your suspicions are aroused.  When the street address is merely, say, Destroyer Avenue, your first thought probably isn’t that this must be an industrial estate based around naval battles of World War II† and you may just drive straight past a large sign by the side of the road saying GRAF SPEE or BISMARK without the faintest inkling it has anything to do with you.

Fortunately I’d left with plenty of time to get lost in.††

. . . And at this point I had better perhaps have a sudden attack of discretion.  I have a little problem with authority anyway, and I have a long sordid history of HAAAAAAAAATING doctors who know better than you do merely because they’re the ones with the ‘MD’ after their names.  Or possibly DVM.   Diagnosis, I say to myself.  We’re hanging on in the hopes of a diagnosis, or at least of eliminating all the possibilities that the current cutting edge of technology††† can examine for us.

At least herself didn’t bite anyone today.  She really was badly out of it on Monday night, because they put needles into her today and took blood and all sorts of indignities, and I was told she behaved very well.  (I did warn the vet I spoke to that Pav had been having a rough stretch in more ways than one.)   She was glad to see me again, but she doesn’t appear to be too traumatised.  Yaay.  I won’t hear any results—other than that the sonogram didn’t show anything that shouldn’t be there—till next week some time.  And if she still has the runs, which she does, I can take yet another faecal sample in to have it re-re-tested for everything tomorrow.

She was absent from us for about eight hours.  We missed her.  I stopped in Mauncester on the way home first because I had something to pick up that had probably grown cobwebs waiting and second because I needed cheering up and what better way, barring chocolate and champagne, than to spend most of an hour pawing through the used sheet music at the back of the little music store?  But when I got home hellhounds were all, But where is that blasted puppy?  And I was, whimper, whimper, I’ve left her with STRANGERS and they’re DOING THINGS TO HER.

The urge now to get horizontal with the three other critters in the room is becoming overwhelming.  I went to bed beautifully early last night, went to sleep instantly and . . . was woken at about 5 a.m. by Pav doing her Protecting Us from Burglars and the Scum of the Universe thing.  I so was not expecting her watchdog facility and have not yet learnt to turn over and go back to sleep, especially when I’m a little farther along the anxious and distracted spectrum than usual.  So if you’ll excuse me. . . .

* * *

* Note that I can’t even remember the last time I was in a bell tower.  Moan.

** Which sweeps up from the main road through two large square blocks of brick-and-flint wall.  This makes me chuckle nastily.  Having just paid for half of a comparatively small block of brick-and-flint wall I know painfully how much the frellers cost, brick by brick and flint by flint.  And it amuses me that even a high-end widget manufacturer decided not to do anything more impressive in the local traditional building style except a pair of a kind of quadruple-sized gateposts.

*** Peter says he’s going to buy me a SatNav.  Oh good.  Another piece of technology to be gotten the better of by.  I have very mixed feelings about Fiona’s, which is the only SatNav I have much experience with.  Maybe I’ll make it laugh and it will feel sorry for me.  That could work.

† You may instead think that it’s to do with a 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 word fantasy series you don’t want to read.

†† I did yesterday too.  We were still late.  But we were whizzed in the blender of the gods twice yesterday, first when both Google maps and the frelling road atlas were behind the times in terms of recent re-laying-out of roundabouts and crossroads and slip roads to superfluous industrial estates and so on, and second when we FINALLY got to the correct frelling village—which I think is in southern Italy, which would explain a lot—we had another occasion where the big roadside billboard is blaring MADAME TUSSAUD’S WAX MONSTROSITIES so you stamp on the pedal to go faster, and the sign you want is about the size of your hand, painted dark green, and hidden under a tree.

††† Five hundred bleeding quid to cross the threshold—that’s before they’ve done anything except give you an appointment—and leave your pound of flesh in the bucket by the door.  And if my insurance doesn’t pay for at least some of it I am so screwed.