There are people in this world who don’t think dogs are clever. These people clearly have not seen what I have seen. If they had, they would have bowed down to the humble hound. They would, upon seeing a dog in the street, remove their jacket and lay it on the floor for them to step on.
Dogs are clever. Clever in ways that seem impossible. Take my dog for example: Jack, like all dogs, knows what a gun is and what it looks like–and he’s never even seen one! (I can’t be sure of that, of course. I got him from a kennel. But I find it hard to believe that the old woman who had him before me had AK47’s up in the loft–)
How I discovered this miraculous fact was this: one day, while Jack and I were watching Rambo, I made my hand in to a gun and pointed it at Jack. Jack had a good sense of humour, so I thought he might find this amusing. But low and behold Jack flinched, stared at my hand as if it were a lethal weapon, and hid under the sofa. It took me twenty-five minutes to coax him out. By that time Rambo had become emotionally unstable and was on the war-path. Jack’s eyes had become wet, and I noticed in the grim light that he really could do with eyebag surgery.
Eventually I regained Jack’s trust. A hard thing to do for a dog that has lived with the constant smell of lavender and wee, and oldness in general. Once he’d come out he stared me in the eyes with the look I knew to mean: Don’t you ever, ever do that again, otherwise this is over. We are over.
That’s how I learned about dogs. I suggest you tread carefully.
I don’t get soup spoons. There’s just no reason for them to exist. Soup spoons, to the few uninitiated of you out there, are the Channel 5 of the spoon world. Cumbersome, annoying to use and far too big (not to mention they can cut the side of your mouth with ease, unless you’re blessed with a mouth like the Blackwall tunnel), Soup spoons infected my dreams as a youngster. Ever since the first encounter with them they gave me nightmares–
In the most common recurring nightmare a Soup spoon—or, as He came to be known to me, Mr Soup Spoon—used to chase me around the house while trying to flash light off his body and direct it in to my eyes. It wasn’t the being chased by him that I minded particularly (I was pretty sure I could fend off a spoon, seeing as I had hands and feet to attack with and all it had was a freakish grin and an attacking nature: plus, it was a dream…), it was more the way he’d try and crawl in to my mouth at any given opportunity, which was something I was prepared to go to great lengths to avoid. For that reason I was forced to scream my head-off with a closed mouth, which, if you’ve ever tried it, you will know is not only very difficult to do at any volume, but extremely weird as feelings go. (As well as the fact that it does actually feel like your head is about to be blown off, which, dream or not, is entirely unpleasant.)
The nightmares eventually subsided when I was twelve, but by then Mr Soup Spoon had exerted a five year reign of terror upon me which saw He and I scaling mountains, floating in outer-space, and generally playing cat and mouse—or spoon and child—as I tirelessly fought to stay away from him.
So do your children a favour: stay clear of the soup spoons…
Right before I log off, I need to relish in a new purchase. I have just bought the greatest newton running shoes that I have ever owned. LA Marathon, here I come!
I am going to be ruthlessly honest: as a child, growing up, I didn’t listen to my Granddad. Or, more accurately, I did listen, but I didn’t take it in as I should have done. Why? It’s obvious: I was young, and this was not young stuff, I had decided. His words seemed comical to me, overly depressing and cynical. Words about war, words about a time gone by that seemed full of things that couldn’t be true, that couldn’t have really happened like he said. Words that I really didn’t want to know about—they put a damper on my young day and they just weren’t fun, that was the point. If it wasn’t fun then I didn’t want to know.
It was only many years later, during a conversation about skin lesions and the horrors of war, that I understood what my Granddad had been through. That was the moment I got it: I realized why he had needed to talk about these things to me. Speaking about these things in his calm, mature voice was his way of exorcising the demons of the past. By turning them around and around in his mind he was able to be at peace in the here and now. And so I felt terribly sad to know this. I felt guilt, shame and that I’d hurt somebody I loved a great deal. So after that day I made a point of asking as many questions as I could. And I really started to learn things. Things which I was privileged to know.
We are a mobile generation. You no longer have to stand still to talk to someone (those silly scooter things; definitely a big help when you don’t want to speak to said someone, though), drink a pint of beer (in Germany they’re encouraging those weird beer-wagons even more in the modern age, the ones you sit and pedal and drink on), or throw a sickie. Instead you can be anywhere you so wish doing whatever it is you wish, providing you can put on a suitably gravelly voice to trick your boss into thinking you are dying in your bed. But mobile does not suit all things, of course. And Tea, probably the greatest invention since sarcasm, has suffered gravely for it.
I can’t handle seeing somebody drinking tea while walking. It’s disgusting. It’s wrong. And passive-tea-watching is, although many are unaware, one of the leading causes of global depression: watching someone walking and drinking tea is exactly the same as trying to read a good book while on a high-speed train. It makes you feel nauseous, disgusted, and bitter to the point that buying a Chris De Burgh greatest-hits album doesn’t seem like a half bad idea.
Why are there no laws to protect us passive tea watchers? Good question. Right up there with ‘why do you never see celebrities fall down the stairs on Big Brother’ or ‘who decided it was a good idea to take the Wispa chocolate bar off the shelves?’ It amazes me that smoking has been banned, yet passive-tea-watching is still not recognized as the massive problem it indeed is. Go to any train station or even resorts in the land and you’ll be able to catch these criminals. It simply must stop for the sake of us and our children and their children and well, I’m getting carried away now.
I’d been in the city for a whole day, most of it spent in phone booths calling adverts from the local paper. I was due back at college in less than two weeks and still didn’t have a place to live.
As the light was fading and my change ran out, I wasn’t sure what to do; I only knew that I wanted to go back to my mum’s and give up on this unsuccessful day. There was an argument raging within me though - I couldn’t give up and go back, I still had to find somewhere to live for the next year, but I felt so tired and wondered how much longer I would spend on this futile exercise.
I decided to walk through the town centre, the long way back to the train station, to give myself a bit of extra thinking time.
I had been walking for about twenty minutes and had definitely decided that enough was enough; I’d come back in a few days and try again. Just as I rounded the corner, I spotted someone from college and waved at her.
She asked me what I was doing and when I explained about my fruitless search for somewhere to live she said, "This is really odd, but give me your phone number."I did, without hesitation. "I don’t know why,"she continued, "But I got off the bus a stop early, maybe I was meant to bump into you. I know someone who might have a room, I can’t promise anything."Wow!
A week later I alighted my train to find a man standing with a big plastic flower in his lapel, just as he said he would be. His house was covered in Alice In Wonderland murals and I loved it straight away. I moved in the day before I started back at college.
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