A break in the clouds

The dogs on the beach ban lifts for 6 months in October, so Rudi and went down the other day and pretty much had the place to ourselves, apart from a few cockle pickers further out on the mud.

I wanted to take the camera down there but the battery was flat and I couldn’t find the charger so I had to make do with the Blackberry. How it would have all turned out with a proper camera I will never know. Life can just be like that sometimes.

The Crowstone with dog on the foreshore

A sort of singing in the car

Ran the dog today as per every morning. I am no longer running myself on account of the winter chest that has returned in the excuse for summer, perhaps next month…

It is grey and chilly but the children still wanted to go to the playground – Dogs Not Allowed – so after a drink Rudi went into the backseat of the car with the windows opened, for air.

As we walked away I heard the most ear-splitting and soulful howling; unmistakeably Rudi protesting about being left behind. I know how he feels.

This song was on the radio whilst I was typing. I had this album in my teens, it was always unfashionable, but I’ll make no apologies for that.

Chillaxing

Sometimes you can put your feet up, but it’s just not happening. We managed to catch Rudi on the sofa between a bout of growling and stressing over the gift of a pork sausage. He can’t eat the item, he has to wander around with it whining…

The Vets

I much prefer a trip to the vets than the doctors. Unless it’s not routine, which is awful. Today was the Rudi Dog’s day for his booster vaccination, which means I’ve had him for three whole years. He’s now transformed from the malnourished, scared of his own shadow lurcher from Navan of December 2007 into a passable impression of a pet. He used to double-back upstairs when he saw the lead, try to run off blindly if there was a sudden noise, and a car passing by on the street caused severe mental trauma. He still growls like a gurrier when approached if he’s half-asleep but, I suppose, some of us wouldn’t be without him now.

He has to keep his Coat of Power on in the vets. He feels naked without it.

Action in the doorway

Old worry whiskers

A Series of Alarming Events

Yesterday started ok. Cold, but not as icy as the day before, although that could have been because I put on a ridiculous striped woolly hat for the morning trot with the dog. Said dog behaved impeccably until he found himself left near a shrubbery into which he vanished. Somehow he ended up on the even more impeccable bowling green where snipping and manicuring was taking place. I had to climb over the fence, walk across the green with a fake sense of purpose and have him pointedly ignore me before vanishing off again. My friend was smart enough to position herself around a corner at an exit point onto the road into the park. He eventually hoved into view thundering past me with his finessed bollocks to you sort of look, but then stopped dead in shame when he met her round the corner. Better than being stopped dead by a car. Git.

This partially conspired to make me 10 minutes late for my first meeting in one place, which morphed into 15 minutes late for the next in another. Behind by a whopping 30 minutes when I finally got to work, the snowballing time lag ended up added another 30 minutes to my own deficit. Losing a whole hour is pretty slack – I’m hoping to retrieve it the weekend after next.

Having lost an hour, I had a pile of stuff to do workwise at home after the school run, so I was pretty annoyed when this loud car or house alarm started going off and broke my concentration. I got the youngest to turn down the tv to see where it might be coming from; we decided it was down the road. In the end it went on so long I told her to turn the tv up and I put my headphones in. Lucky then I heard the doorbell. I went to the door in a bit of a huff and said to my neighbour who had summoned me that this alarm going off for so long was a sodding nuisance.

And, this I am afraid is completely true, he said to me: it’s your alarm.

Whereupon I think he was expecting me to say something along the lines of oh silly me, I’ll turn it off. What I said was: well it shouldn’t be going off because it doesn’t work. He clearly thought I was crazy, so he came in to check that the control pad was indeed dead, which it is because having never had the alarm code the executive decision was taken to snip the wires to it ages ago.

So like Rudi being caught in shame round the corner by one neighbour this morning, I was now trapped in my own yard in total humiliation because it turns out my house alarm is the worst noise known to man, I didn’t twig it was mine until someone came round to tell me and, even then, I couldn’t turn it off.

I suggested smashing it up with a big stick, but the neighbour is a proper tradesman and he fetched a long ladder which he went up. He then came back down and fetched a screwdriver with which he might have felt like rapping me over the knuckles at the very least for useless articleness, but being gracious he went back up the ladder and managed to make the noise stop. A pity he couldn’t do the same for the usual cacophony in my head, some of which ends up here. There’s loads that don’t!

A nice genteel spot for a tear-up innit

Pavlovian Responses

This conditioning abounds in the animals in our house. Apparently, the cat starts tapping on the duvet after the first weekday alarm goes off about 5.30 am – the eerie light illuminating her fat tabby face. “Come on! Time to get up and feed me” she commands “I heard the alarm.”

When my alarm goes off about an hour later the dog starts what can only described as light shoving with claws, which reaches an urgency of whining and licking your face if you don’t jump out of bed forthwith. You would be forgiven for thinking he was desperate to go out and relieve himself, but I think he is more after the digestive biscuit.

Once we are out of bed the fish join in. What people in the room? Shoal attractively at the front of the tank in anticipation of fish flakes.

I also know of a house mouse down the road that is trained to a bell on the back door. If it hears the bell, it knows the door has been opened, and legs it back in. Now that’s clever.

So the weekend, where there are no bleeping alarms, throws the pets into confusion.
Am I on my second sleep? Is she ever going to vacate my pillow? Where is my biscuit? Their general restlessness and pacing and prodding gets you up anyway.

Pavlovian responses are not just confined to the animals round here either. Mine is: it’s Saturday so I’d better lose some money. At Ayr the Gold Cup that features 20+ runners over 6 furlongs, where being drawn high helped yesterday, the going changed overnight and at least half of them are trained by forked tongue Dandy Nicholls, has my response wavering though. So no Ayr for me; I’ll lose it in Berkshire instead on The Paddyman in the Mill Reef. Or maybe I’ll bundle it all up and throw in Hawkeyethenoo to make it a proper Saturday experience. I’m salivating already.

Rudi in Ireland - daggers @ the poodle

Why walking a lurcher is bad for your shoulders

My shoulders to be more accurate. You see I have been stepping the old training programme for the Southend 10K which is in but a few short weeks. When I say stepping up, it is really stepping it up from a baseline of zero which is in part due to holidays, but also because of a set of impediments to overcome which included two knackered knees. So this week, most mornings before work, I have been trotting about in my New Balance trainers (none of my own obviously) with the dog (two birds one stone, multi-tasking, time is money, lunch is for wimps etc. etc.).

Looks like there’s a sudden outbreak of parentheses there doesn’t there? Well that’s because I slipped into running mode and when you are engaged in that activity thinking tends to take on a parenthetical aspect. (Sorry if I just made that word up.)

It goes thus: I am thinking at the front of my brain “Ah yes only fifteen days to go to the 10K. With a positive attitude and a few more sessions like this I’ll be well on target for breaking the makemeadiva PB set last year.” And then that other voice chimes in (Yeah right, you’ll be lucky if you manage to break out of a walk. Remember last year when the blind runner ran right past you? Muppet.) So on I go. Positive mental attitude being dragged down by bracketed rudeness and general undermining.

Back on track. The dog accompanies me. And most of this week I have been wondering (not in brackets) why at least one shoulder is so damn stiff and my legs are fine. Is my upper body running action excessive? It took me about four days to work it out. Now you see the etymology of the word lurcher is purported to be from the Roma word lur which means thief. But having owned a few dogs I would say thief is probably a fairly general term for most dogs (except perhaps for those toy breeds that don’t have secret rope ladders to compensate for their lack of stature). Rudi read the page in the manual on thieving, but he has elected to take his breed name quite literally.

I am a lurcher therefore I lurch.

On all walks I will lurch suddenly across the path of my handler at cats and squirrels wrenching her shoulders nearly out of their sockets. It’s in the job description. There’s probably a song that he sings too.

I lurch all night and I lurch all day, the people round here they all do say….

That’s to the tune of “There’s a worm at the bottom of the garden”.

My musical response is this. Bear in mind I am now going to work, my shoulder hurts and that flipping happy as larry lurcher is lazing on my bed as I type. Probably on my pillow, even though I hid it. Happy Friday.

Old dog walks, new dog walks

The old dog walks looked like this: wander through hill and vale, forest and beach, swim and fetch (dogs not me) the dog in perfect harmony by my side.

My new dog walks look like this: risk assess area for 25mph running, small furry things and dogs he mayn’t like the look of before removing lead. Spend rest of “walk” running after him in fruitless fashion calling his unheeded name.

I am shortly trying a new thing this morning: a dog walk with another sighthound. A proper ex-racer with height, grace and good manners. Hopefully.

*A few hours lapse*

Faith’s Lad, the racing name of the greyhound we were with more than fulfilled his personal specification and Rudi the Dude (his racing name when he starts his glittering lurcher racing career) was well-mannered too. High class company must’ve rubbed off on him. Good.

How Rudi rolls

If I ever come back in an afterlife, I wouldn’t mind the pampered life of this kind of lurcher. I’d like to go straight into the pampering phase though please and skip the first six to eight months of starvation, vagrancy and being run over by a car – to be fair it’s not put him off them, so long as he’s a passenger.

Are we there yet?

Keeping an eye on the sheep

Too much fresh air thanks

Riding shotgun on the home leg

.

He didn’t earn a promotion to get into the front there. On the first morning away the boot closing mechanism went and we spent the week with the thing lashed shut with 25lb fishing line x 2. I didn’t trust it for the journey home and wedged myself in between the girls in the back whilst yer man travellled in some splendour. Not bad for a fawn dog from Navan.

When the Devon Home Cook comes to town (Part I)

Notwithstanding it being midweek and there being business meetings on the morrow, stuff happens.

Stuff that would never hardly ever happen normally.

Stuff like this

Excuse the mess