Garden Envy

This weekend has been the local village's "Open Gardens" weekend, raising money for the village hall. For payment of a small fee, you can nosy about in the gardens of those brave and industrious souls who are prepared to show their gardens to the public. I have admired golden hens and blue Lutyens benches, and rows of currant bushes and giant compost heaps, but I know deep in my heart, if I had an acre of garden, it wouldn't look like the ones I'm wandering round.

Any garden I have would be "Designed by Dog", and there would be no delicate little alpines in the borders (that die when wee'd on), nor would my lawn look like a bowling green. There would be long patches of couch grass (Herbie's favourite snack) and a long smooth bit for Holly to sprint on, as opposed to the cunningly curved vistas with artfully posed statues. One garden today had a lifesized fibreglass cow. I wouldn't have one of those, either.

On that subject, I went to the hairdressers, and Sharon gleefully told me of the tourist who had come in for a cut earlier in the week, and then asked the salon manager for colour as well. "But not like yours, it looks common. I want something more subtle." Of all the people I'd want to insult, it wouldn't be the woman with scissors (and peroxide) in her hands...

Losing Weight

Not me, unfortunately, but Herbie. It looks like the CV247 was only able to stave off the inevitable for so long, and now he's going a little further downhill. His appetite is still excellent, so I'm giving him extra cottage cheese after breakfast. Maybe he'll eat tripe again. It was a tip I gleaned from Lurcherlink a long time ago, as a way of getting weight onto a scrawny sighthound, but Herbie was fed a lot of tripe when he first developed swollen glands, and was losing a pound a week despite eating till he was barrel-shaped. He ate tripe through the early weeks of chemo, and then started refusing it. I don't know if he'll associate it now with chemo, but it might be time to try again.

Tripe, even uncooked, is vile stuff. The Scary Parking Attendant in Helmsley has adopted a new Great Dane, a young male (of course he'd intended to get a middle-aged bitch!) whose owners were emigrating to New Zealand and couldn't afford to fly the dog out with them. The Dane was used to cooked tripe, but after cooking it once, the SPA's wife said "Either the tripe goes or I do." An intelligent woman, who had realised that the dog certainly wasn't going.

Fortunate for me, then, that I need to lose weight, I'm excused the tripe diet myself - but if that was all I had in the house, I would definitely rather starve!

Back Again

Bit of a long haul, almost as if we'd had to invent fire from scratch. But finally, we have Stove (yet to be named - apparently named objects work better) in place, and although there's a fair bit of decorating to be done, I have a major sense of achievement. Also an empty bank account, but I know that as soon as winter comes, I will be very happy I've spent my money on heating.

Herbie let it all wash over him - he wanted to go investigate the builders and the heating engineers for ten minutes, then he'd had enough, and went back to bed. Holly, on the other hand, spent days waiting for her chance to escape, and finally took it, the one day I'd gone back to work and left the engineers to it. They managed to catch her (in fact she got bored, and trotted up the garden path and waited by the front door for them to let her back in) and were quite embarrassed when I got home. After all my careful warnings. She can't open the front door, but she can open all the internal ones, so Keep The Front Door Shut.

Slowly the house is returning to normal, or what passes for it in this part of the world. I wouldn't want to have to install new heating again in a hurry.