I should know better

Still trailing back and forth to the doctor, I was in a great hurry the other morning, and not amused when a selection of dogs spotted something in the field above the house (possibly a fox), went tearing through the fence and ran about screaming with excitement, deaf to my shouts.

I became rapidly more and more angry, shouting through the hedge and obviously terrifying Postman Pat who arrived just in time to intercept the stream of abuse and threats and shot back into his red van like a rabbit down a burrow.

The people who planted trees in that field then, for reasons only known to them, enclosed it in the sort of fence used in Jurassic Park to keep in tyrannosaurs. Of course it is completely permeable to Papillons. But not to me.

At that point I lost it. I could feel myself turning green and my muscles enlarging. Incandescent with fury, I went for the large bolt cutters and carved a me-sized hole in the T-rex fence and through I went with the yard broom. The truants were appalled to see me on that side of the fence, and even more appalled as the hard bristles of the broom made contact with their backsides. I have never seen Sonja and the other Heroines of the Soviet Union move so fast.

I shut them away and raced off to try and make the appointment.

I suspect that a few of them preferred to stand while waiting for me to come home.

The appointment? I had to wait 70 minutes. So I went into Hulk mode again, tore a strip off the locum and made a formal written complaint.

As Dr Banner says, "You wouldn`t like to see me angry".

Camilla`s boys at six weeks, past masters at doing cute

This is Dante, thinking profound puppy thoughts....."when did I last eat?...why is she pointing that at me?..." 

This lad was to be Leonardo, but everyone assures me that "Leonardo" just means "turtle" nowadays, not an artist......anyway here he is, soon to be looking for a permanent home. 

A while since the last post, and yet again I am no stranger to the doctor.

I slogged out there again in the rain this morning, rattling with the pills I had been given for a strange skin eruption on my face. It had been diagnosed as shingles - the only painless shingles in history.

The doctor examined the large portion of my face that now looks a lot like the surface of the moon.

"Ah" he said darkly. "Would you allow a second opinion?"

And there I sat, my swollen, pitted face the subject of intense discussion. I felt as though I was auditioning for a flim of "Bride of The Elephant Man", with the studio bean-counter dancing about in the background muttering, "Hire this one - we`ll save a fortune in makeup over a six month shoot".....

Argument raged over whether this was herpes simplex (with complications) or herpes zoster (with complications). Well, thought I, it`s all herpes, and there are only two kinds......yes, gentle reader, there is the Other Sort, but just don`t go there, because I certainly haven`t.

The outcome predictably was another course of pills. That`s as well as the ones I have to take five times a day every four hours - do the arithmetic and ask yourself when I am supposed to sleep.

No, I`m not posting pictures of this horror. Have some cute puppy ones instead.

Meanwhile I have the Club Show at the weekend.

Anyone have a spare burkah?

Coming home in the pouring rain from a shopping expedition, I caught a bus I don`t usually get. As I sat enjoying the scenery a little man leaned over and asked,

"Mata- lan?"

I thought, and said I was fairly sure that the bus did pass Matalan, though it was beyond my stop.

The wee woman sitting opposite was sure it didn`t.

"Ask the driver," I suggested.

"Driver no use. Driver Polish. I Lithuanian - not speak Polish."

The Wee Woman stood up to her full five foot one. Full of optimism, she asked,

"Anyone on the bus speak Polish?"

There were six of us on the bus. The two at the back spoke up. "We Bosnian, we not know Pole speak."

The one in the middle beamed with delight. "You Lithuanian also?"

The mathemtically minded among you will have worked out that the Wee Woman and I were in a significant minority here. As we gazed at each other in some surprise, the two Lithuanians began a fervent conversation in which a word very like "Polski" was repeated with varying vicious-sounding epithets and sour glances at the driver.

I have no Lithuanian and exactly one word of Polish, which is "zloty", and didn`t seem too relevant. I was happy to bow out of this exercise in multiculturalism and get off at my stop. The bus sailed on into the rain, a rolling international incident.

As the Wee Woman said, "It`s no so much where they come from, it`s why the hell the poor souls ended up here?"

Camllla and her boys - every mother will recognise that exhausted look 

No excuse needed for posting pictures of puppies.

The two little men are flourishing and fat. Camilla has done everything by the book, but still gives the impression of being a bit dazed and confused by motherhood.......should they be learning to bark? Should they be chewing her tail.? It was a big shock when they got up and moved about - she hadn`t known they would be so alarmingly mobile. At least she hasn`t been as paranoid as her own mother used to be - at the slightest sound she would bury the puppies and I would have to unearth them from mounds of bedding. They must have spent the initial formative weeks believing they were moles.

Little does Camilla know, but this is the quiet stage.

Let`s see how she takes to it when they are racing about.

The birthday boy and his brother......guess which one is devoted to golf, and which one is devoted to girls? Brother is practising his famous look guaranteed to loosen all knicker elastic within a 20 mile radius. Birthday boy is visualising fairways and birdies.

Well, I`m getting there. On Saturday I made it to a party - well kind people took me there and brought me back and I didn`t have to do much beyond eat good food and look pale and interesting.

It was the 21st of one of my cousin`s boys. He has completed an economics degree and is taking a year out to see if he can make it as a pro golfer . We had an excellent get-together and a fine meal.

There was a cake in the shape of a golfbag. There was also a lot of small children. They were fascinated by the cake - they picked at it, they poked it, they broke over it like a wave. Not too many adults were eventually drawn to taste the cake....

As one of the elders present at an event like this it`s really expected that you will provide good advice for one setting out on life. I rose to the occasion as always, and found myself suggesting that one should sell one`s soul to buy Tesco shares and giving lots of pointers on how to disguise your online identity while doing illegal downloads.

The birthday boy wants to take 3 of us older ones out for a "lovely day to remember". Alas, he has let slip that the reason for the trip is that he doesn`t expect us still to be there when he gets back from the year`s golfing adventure, and he will be the one doing the remembering. The three of us are amazingly unimpressed by this effort to bury us quickly and I think if we do go we will set our minds to really giving him something to remember....

Knowing the three of us, maybe a night in the cells....?