I should know better

A very quiet month here.

Ella and Velvet should have had a few show appearances....but the two young ladies got together last month and looked at a few magazines and decided that these long flowing coats were SO last year, and had to be thrown away. Ella in particular has taken fashion to extreme and is now, frankly bald - and clouds of hair still falling out. I have spoken to her severely about the last horrible winter and the vagaries of fashion, and received a blank Chin stare as she shrugged out a few more hairs.

Fidget declines to behave. He prances and barks and is totally a naughty puppy.

At the weekend we had the wettest show I have ever attended. We shivered in a leaky marquee as the monsoon battered down. Nothing stayed dry. There were sudden, intense cascades of drips. Catalogues became soggy. There were no dry surfaces to sit on. I spent a lot of time trying to keep my camera dry. It was the ultimate tent experience - soaking outside, the same inside. (I am well known for hating tents).

Our ring was between Dalmatians and Schnauzers. Not the best situation. Fidget had to sit on my knee and acclimatise to the presence of these horrible things until his barking calmed down. Ella stared at the Dalmatians, her eyes as big as saucers. Could they be real? After some time she concluded that they were hallucinations (spots before the eyes) and went back to her usual show preoccupation - extracting titbits from nearby people by batting her eyelashes at them and doing extreme cute.

Her ring was in another storm-tossed marquee, across a sodden muddy swamp, and I could see us both sinking without trace, so we quietly gave up on that.

Fidget exhibited his usual split personality - standing like a rock when asked, the same on the table, but bouncing and barking on the move. He is definitely a work in progress. Slow progress.

As we slogged out slowly through the sticky mud, I could see all sorts of metaphors for the whole dogshowing business surfacing.....

But I am not about to subject anyone to those.

I pushed them firmly down, back into the mud.