Dogs Delight 20 Tall dark and strange

There is one stranger in the church tonight, a tall dark newcomer with whom I share a moment of recognition. 

  Surely I would remember if I had seen him before!

As we are leaving the Reverend Newsome offers us each a long thin hand and we look questions at each other, all three.  The stranger has a shadowed sensitive face I already know, the facsimile of the engraving of Byron at the front of my Romantic Poetry book.  Can this be the impressively fast answer to my prayer?  But before we can speak there is a bustling behind us.  The regulars, dour cast of the village pantomime, are assiduous in wishing us goodbye and it seems to me that by the force of this farewell they are underlining their role as hosts at Saint Agnes’.  We are the guests, the stranger and I; prodigal children.  Remember, an inward voice is prompting them, the Father loves the prodigal son.  And so we are ostentatiously provided with service sheets and hymn books by the goodly folk; watched over and nodded at and nudged when we lose our place.  This welcome ensures that we leave somehow embarrassed and will not soon return.  When I look back up the path the stranger is not there. 

A cold breeze is getting up as I saunter reluctantly home, lifting and scattering the piles of dirty leaves.  The skulking smoker has gone and the notices about gun clubs and the WI’s threatened Oklahoma gleam in the yellow light of the street lamp. 

Bailey greets me in the hall, lowers his head slowly and ejects a mouldering starling on to the carpet.

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Dogs Delight 21 Red sauce

It is the morning after Evensong and also after the curry.  Richard is swallowing the indigestion remedies he keeps in a cupboard in the kitchen, next to his range of red hot sauces: Thai and West Indian, Chinese chilli, and the newest bottle, the contents vermilion as the geraniums before they withered, with its label, ‘Insanity Sauce’: a jolly gift from a friend.  Ranked behind are more red sauces with names like Steaming Momma and Texan Big Bastard. 
I am sitting in the garden in a fine rain, huddled in my coat and considering my options as the marble angel sneers at the ugly line of conifers against the dull sky.  I am conjuring up a favourite image of Richard as a vampire waiting for me behind the end conifer, a line of red sauce dribbling from his mouth.  Evensong at St Agnes’ has not dispelled my fears or put me in possession of myself, so as a distraction from thoughts of my husband I make some bullet points:

·      Holiday 

·      Painting 

·      Visit

   …I suppose I could just go away for a while, to think, as they say.  I could explain to Richard that I must go, that it will benefit all of us: perhaps to somewhere with a high winding cliff path and raging seas where I could walk with my cold face taut against the spray, collar up and my hair windswept.  The seas must be raging at this time of year. 

   Perhaps I won’t tell Richard; or anyone.

   Shall I go on a retreat?  Or just catch a train somewhere?

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Dogs Delight 22 Weeding the countryside

   I am imprisoned in the village as surely as Hilary Green, who never leaves its boundaries as she weaves about tearing up groundsel and thistles and stickyweed.  This tidying of the village and the lanes is a serious matter.  Only rarely, after two or three glasses of cider and green ginger in the Lone Gelding snug, does she become skittish, hiding behind the hedge to throw trails of stickyweed at the coats of passers-by.  This exercise must give her some relief, I suppose. 

 

I have heard newcomers laughing about Hilary, but I consider her sinister.  Perhaps I am afraid that if I do not escape I will one day join her, trailing behind her as she roams around the village, both of us wrapped in woollen garments with grey wisps escaping from our woollen hats, rapt in our vocation.

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Dogs Delight 23 Labrador not retriever

I lie on my bed, watching a grey cloud roll across the window, dreaming up ways to escape.  Sometimes I am alone but sometimes I am with the stranger from Evensong.  We rush through an airport together, happy and excited, or hand in hand we tread the gangway of a cruise liner wearing tropical clothes.  We are always laughing.

                                               

When I  hear the door slam as Mrs Dilkes heavily leaves the house I wander downstairs and realise that Bailey has been missing for hours; so I haul on Richard’s waxed jacket and set off to find him in the heavy rain.  Retrievers are meant to retrieve but I am often out in the fields retrieving Bailey and I don’t think he has ever brought back anything useful: just carrion and the large stones he digs up in fields and streams, which wear down his teeth and trip people up as they cross the fields.

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Dogs Delight 24 Foxhunting

Peter Hopkirk marches past with two buckets of hot manure, throwing me his usual discounting glance.

 

As I am passing the Lone Gelding I hear loud retorts and the thunder of rolling metal.  Stokes, the landlord, is out at the back again with his shotgun and Jack Russell, blasting at foxes. 

He rarely empties the large catering bins, which attract them in numbers from the fields around.  Probably this neglect is deliberate as, witnessing him aiming and firing in silhouette, anyone can see he revels in his sport.  He also takes the odd potshot at Brunt’s yard in the hope of taking out Russell, who is now crowing at dusk and supper time as well as before dawn. 

I ponder the complete lack of attractive personalities in the village.  Stokes’ personality, for instance, has hardly a positive trait and nor has his appearance.  Think of how he leers at revellers from the shadows behind the bar: yellow dome circled by straggling hair, a seedy Dickensian miser in a holey cardigan. 

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Dogs Delight 25 Stock market

He occasionally remembers his duty as landlord and throws in a comment to stir up controversy, generally on the need to ‘bring back the stocks.’


Stocks on the village green, say Stokes and his cronies, will not only bring down vandalism but bring in tourists.  (They say he is building a set in his gun shed.)  His supporters cite the example of  Near Otterby, which still has its gibbet, provoking envy in the villages all around.  Some of the regulars have begun calling him ‘Stokesy’ in a game and doomed attempt to lend him a more amiable character.  

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Dogs Delight 26 Village colour

He and the slatternly Mrs Stokes have a silent son who dyes ferrets: pink, usually, but red and green at Christmas. 

But he does it in a perfunctory way, as though there is nothing better to do and certainly not with an appropriate sense of joy. 

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Dogs Delight 27 In solitary

Striding through the damp fields behind the pig farm I pass a broken lorry, the cab tilted sideways into the nettles, which I imagine which must be an
enticing object for Peter Hopkirk, causing him a lot of envy and agitation.  


Over the fence I see Brunt has another pig in solitary confinement. 

‘I puts any naughty pig in a field by hisself,’ he once told me sibilantly, through stubby brown teeth. 

The sinning pig is eating, unconcerned, and the rest of the herd are making their low contented grunting as they listen to a Chopin Prelude in their long broken shed, patched here and there with squares of asbestos.  The muck-encrusted radio dimly visible on a sill is permanently tuned to Radio Three.  Maybe the dial is stuck, or more likely Brunt doesn’t know how to change stations.

 

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Dogs Delight 28 Retriever

Despite wading through several fields until my boots are mud-heavy I can find no trace of Bailey and turn for home wondering whether Mrs Hunt has locked him in the Hound Pen again or Stokes has accidentally shot him. 

But when I reach the Lone Gelding car park I turn and see a movement by a distant hedgerow and Bailey races towards me with his long easy lope.  He is waving his tail wildly and gladly and in his mouth there is a hand.

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Dogs Delight 29 Funny turn

The damp smell of grass is sweet.  It reminds me of a picnic long ago, but it was summer then and the field was bright with buttercups so tall I could lose myself.  Just like then, I never want to get up again.  I lie completely still until the damp has seeped through my coat and I am shivering. 

Stokes’ Jack Russell finds me when they come out to lock up the shotgun for the night and Stokes hauls me up roughly, muttering under his breath.

In the dark empty lounge of the Lone Gelding Mrs Stokes begins to pour out a brandy, but I ask for Pernod instead: long and with lots of ice in a tall glass.  It’s the only drink I really like.


  

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Dogs Delight 30 Bad dog

The village is a long line of houses forming Main Street, with a few short rows leading off.  Main Street is now lined with bulky television vehicles and two satellite vans are parked on the village green, all because of Bailey’s discovery. 

This morning two local television crews hammered on our door and asked to film him, but Richard sent them away, swearing freely, and let Bailey out at the back into the garden, where he dug a hole in the lawn. 

I stay inside, shaking, waiting for the police inspector to arrive.  Through the window I can see two officers following Bailey around the maples, hoping to discover where he buries his treasures; but Bailey does not usually bury things as he prefers to eat them straightaway.  One of the policemen tells me they may have to arrest him. 

I can’t tell whether or not he is joking. 

Dogs Delight 31 Silent witness

The Inspector is short with a round pleasant face and he tries to be kind, but my lips are quivering when I answer him so it is hard to form the words and I can tell him so little.

‘I looked at Bailey.  At first I thought it was an old glove.  Then I suppose I must have fainted.’

 

Richard says that he raced back from work when the landlord rang and found Bailey sitting by the back door, waiting for his dinner.  He explains how Bailey squeezes in under the fence at the end of the garden where there is a missing post.  Richard and the Inspector look at each other, as if I am making it up. 

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Dogs Delight 32 Dog house

The hand is nowhere to be seen and now Bailey is with the vet, who has been ordered to collect and examine everything he produces.  When Richard heard about this he laughed and said, ‘I expect that will put a smile on his face.’

His laughter is unnatural.

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Dogs Delight 33 Local news

In the morning there is a large photograph of Bailey in the Laxley Gazette with the glaring headline, ‘The Beast with Five Fingers.’ 

I think this is worse than last night’s television news, which showed the village uncustomarily festive with its fluttering lines of police tape and furtive groups of villagers aiming glares at the camera.  We watched it with Mrs Dilkes, who was excited because the reporter had accosted Mr Dilkes for his reaction to the story and she was eager to see him on screen.  The Dilkes haven’t bought a television yet.

‘He said it’s shocking that it should happen in a tight-knit community like this,’ she told us; which was a sensible response, if untrue.  But while he was speaking Pamela Jolie rode Saracen too close to the cameraman, knocking his elbow, and his interview was not used.

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Dogs Delight 34 Witch

Instead they showed the postmistress, who claims to be a witch, her eyes looking at each other, her long face in close-up under the black shawl:

‘We’re not a tight-knit community,’ she proclaims aggressively.  ‘Witches face a lot of prejudice in backward places like this.  I expect people will be pointing fingers at me.’

‘Only if they can find them,’ said Richard as the witch was pushed aside by Mrs Hunt leaning into the microphone and barking, ‘A lot of fuss.  Labradors are bound to retrieve things left lying around.  It’s their instinct.’

                                         

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Dogs Delight 35 Child care

My retriever retrieved a hand, out in the fields....

At least I don’t have to collect James and Christopher today.  They are with their Grandma for a few days, so something good has come out of this.


    

I decide I will do ordinary things: show my face in the village; go out into the street to buy something.  Though there is nothing to buy here but meat. 

      
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Dogs Delight 36 Neighbourhood watch

On my way to the butcher’s I meet Peter Hopkirk wheeling a large home-made trolley containing a builder’s spade and a complicated device for unblocking drains.   

 

He is wearing his best boiler suit and waders and gives me a cynical glance before steering the contraption scornfully past the satellite van and the array of media vehicles by the green. 

Peter Hopkirk disapproves of newcomers with a silent bitter intensity; of the media, obviously, and of the Hunts, who will soon have been at Cobblers’ Cottage for thirty years.  They are throwing a celebratory party at Christmas.  As if staying in the village for any length of time is something  to celebrate!

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Dogs Delight: The Plot

Save me!  My husband is planning to kill me!  No one understands me except for my labrador and now he's involved in a police investigation after finding something absolutely horrific out in the fields. 
They'll find me out there next and then you'll be sorry....  Though probably you won't care.
I should be with someone sensitive; someone you would appreciate me.
...Like Byron...
Or Keats.

                               

                                                                             











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Slugs ate my trowel

I'm not sure about the choisyas.  They're too big - they're blocking out the light.  They should really come out.  But not now they're about to flower - I'll just cut them back a bit.
But I'll take the hazel out because we never get any nuts.  Because F cuts them back in summer, because they overhang, and the nuts only grow on the new wood.  A few nuts survive, sometimes.  But a squirrel eats those.  
I'm not sure about the apple tree.  Since the other one died there are no apples, because the other one must have been the pollinator.  I suppose I could buy another...  It looks alright and I don't like taking things out.
But that primula.  It's red.  It doesn't go with the rest of the border, with all the yellow primroses.  I don't like taking things out so I'll stick it in a pot and take it inside - it'll brighten up the living room.  It's all because of Vita Sackville-West and her famous White Garden, making everything else look overdone.  Now mine's nearly colourless.  Just green, really.  So those geraniums don't go at all.  I'd give them away to somebody who likes magenta, if I could think of anybody.
And the pear tree.  It looks nice, but last year we only got the one pear.  And that was hard.  No one really wanted it. 
I'm going in, it's all too depressing.  I'll just get that primula.

....It doesn't go with the wallpaper.

Slugs ate my trowel 2

Baby carrots, beetroots and beans. The seeds are in a cool dark place, as recommended on the packet, though I imagine they'd prefer to be out of the packet in a cool damp place, as it's May already.


Tulips are flowering in the cool damp place - four beds of voluptuous white tulips where the carrots should be. Parrot tulips in full flower, except for the front right-hand bed, where they have already died. Except for a solitary petal fluttering in the May gales.

I've been looking forward to these tulips all winter, so do I dig them up to make room for salads and cabbage? There'd be beds of bare soil right in the centre of the garden. Of course they should stay there, wide flamboyant leaves flapping in the breeze, yellowing and withering until they have died back - maybe by July - to swell the bulbs for next Spring, when I could have the same problem again.

Or I could pull them up and store them in the shed so they can go mouldy and be eaten by mice.

Slugs ate my trowel 3

If you seem to be in charge of the garden, it's great to have a man who does the lawn.  There is after all so much else to do. 

Designing the garden.  Digging it, weeding it.  Pulling out big roots and dividing them up and replanting them in places around the borders where they can disrupt other things.  Building a compost heap; turning the compost heap, watering it and after months and months of this distributing it in heavy bucketloads around the garden. 

Heaving tubs about.  Cutting things, especially things that are out of reach; shaping things; encouraging something to grow and then pruning it.  Digging out large cobblestones and bricks that have somehow got in amongst the soil.  The tormenting logistics of sowing and growing on and planting out.  The Garden Centre.

So I am grateful to have a man who does the lawn, wearing goggles as he first  slices at the edges with his strimmer as protection from the flying chips off the brick edging; slicing at the long grass and peonies and roses, hacking into geraniums and decapitating delphiniums and foxgloves.  'They shouldn't hang over the edge.'

And he doesn't rest on laurels but hurriedly stashes away the strimmer and roars about with the mower, up and down, up and down very fast so as to arrive at the object of his exercise: the smug cold lager downed while admiring his lawn.

Although he always does the lawn there are things he doesn't do.

Levelling it.  Pulling out coarse grasses and big dandelions.  Weeding it generally.  Sowing bare patches.  But when I do them he brings me out a beer. 

 

Slugs ate my trowel: Only one carrot

Only one carrot has come up.

 

I was pleased about the lack of summer because up to now I've been able to blame the rain.  You should never plant carrots just before it rains hard, apparently.  So when has anyone planted them?     

Still, it's growing well now the sun is out.  And it's not just a home-grown organic carrot.  It's a home-grown organic Chantenay carrot, deserving fast buttery cooking with mint and honey; or roasting in olive oil.

The bad news is Chantenay carrots are small.  Very small.

It's a lot of work for one carrot and I expect someone else will eat it.    

Slugs ate my trowel 5 Snails chillax

Slugs and snails, fed up with jet stream July, are sliding inside the house.

A loopy silver trail over the black socks drying on the bottom rail in the conservatory.  (Men's socks, luckily.)  The sort of pattern Next might like to try for a change.

Another meandering up the wall and over the door to where a fat snail must be holing up in the ceiling slat.  One chillaxing behind the dog basket, like David Cameron.

Milanese snail

Sometimes when we come back at night the headlights reveal an Olympic challenge of huge slugs racing up the house wall to the bathroom window.  If one makes it inside it is my job to evict it.  (I am also I/C spiders; in fact I/C everything except caterpillars.)

Outside the snails have eaten all the pak choi and are copulating openly.  And the stupid birds, who have eaten all the redcurrants, are leaving them to enjoy themselves in peace. 

Giant African land snail  (Could be worse)

   

Slugs ate my trowel 4

I was quite proud of my delphiniums.   And you would think they would attract good comment, especially after the tulips.  'Aren't they gorgeous!'  Even, 'Aren't they blue!'  But no, all anyone says is, 'Aren't they tall!'

At first I was quite proud that they were tall, though I'd prefer to say well grown.  They are growing in a tub, quite a shallow tub, and I started wondering whether they had enough soil.  But they seemed happy, spreading about and growing taller, until the storm came. 

The ones on the right bent sideways, so I tied them to stakes and supports and they carried on blooming, blowsy ladies on sticks and zimmer frames.  Some of them fell off in the second storm, but that was OK because I stuck them in a vase in the window for the Queen.  (They complemented the England flag I'd hung in the other window after being told off by the village for having no bunting.)  

Now they are all leaning right, like a row of mature ladies after the extra sherry.  In the autumn I'm going to have to take them out and plant them in the borders.  Until then they'll be straggling and turning yellow, right in front of the window.  A focal point. 

Most of the bunting is straggling too, pulled down and washed away, but the England flag's still out.

                                                       

Body builders

I'm glad my husband hasn't got a man in tomorrow.

He's had an electrician in, he's booked a chippie and a decorator who've both been for a measure up and for the past week there's been a builder in the garden who bares his cleavage whenever he can. 

Not my builder

When the sun even threatens to come out in a minute (if you're lucky) he pulls his shirt off.  Glance through any window to feel like a voyeur.

He does have a near-Olympian body.  (Boxer rather than 100 metres.)  But what is it about builders that they treat the bodies they flaunt with disdain?

His sun-baked back, never plastered by sunscreen, is as red as the bricks he's digging up and occasionally moving about.  He doesn't wear a protective mask when he saws up things that he shouldn't inhale.

He stops sawing and has a fag and asks for three sugars in his tea.  "When you're ready, love."
 

The body he's building won't look so good in a year or two.

A roofer arrives and before you can say Health and Safety he's flat out on a dodgy roof cuddling the old asbestos before beating it with a hammer.  Without a mask. 

The senior builder arrives and says stop worrying, he's moved tons of asbestos lately:
 

"You don't need a licence, love.  Just common sense." 


     

FARMERS' MARKET TIME TRAVEL

Time travelling is easy.  Go to a farmers' market.

Not a poncy sun-dried goat's cheese  farmers' market.  A market with farmers, in a proper market town.  Selling sheep and pigs and ducks.  One where they warn you when you park that your car could get dented by an escaping bullock.  "Happened last week."

In the madding crowd there are canny groups of Thomas Hardy men, conferring about the price of calves and black-face sheep, which are the coolest sheep at the market. 

You expect to see Bathsheba Everdene any minute, turning heads and bartering sharply for sheep feed.  You certainly see her nightie in the indoor market, hanging on a rack with several more.  Pristine, but definitely Victorian. 

You see Mellors and his jacket with all the smeared waxed pockets and his young pheasants.  And his gun, among a lot of other guns and cages for ferrets.  And ferrets. 

There are the odd jarring notes.  Dayglo harnesses and jackets for ferrets.   A few men like Mellors's mates, if Mellors had mates, selling night-shot videos about catching pheasants and rabbits. 

And an iphone on a water trough, in a sheep pen with straw on the floor.

10 quotable quotes

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.  Oscar Wilde

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.  Winston Churchill

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.  Mahatma Gandhi   

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.  Russell Lynes

And what is the use of a book...without pictures or conversation?  Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
 
Pay no attention to what the critics say. There was never put up a statue to a critic.  Jean Sibelius

I got nasty habits. I take tea at three.  Mick Jagger

Exit, pursued by a bear.  Stage direction, A Winter's Tale, Act III Scene 3, William Shakespeare

There is no need to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist.
But seeeing what the man will do unbrib'd, there's no occasion to.
Humbert Wolfe

A foolish man would have swallowed it.  Dr Johnson, after spittting out a hot potato.

Angry Birds

The Angry Birds are really making you angry.

How many hours did it take to learn everything?  I mean, all the permutations of the Angry Birds' skill set?  

Learning how to draw the catapult looks fun.  Intuitive even.  But learning how to maximise the explosions?  The blue birds dividing into three smaller birds!  Those suicide bomber birds.  White birds dropping explosive eggs.  The Angry Birds are more accomplished than a Jane Austen heroine's rival.

How many hours to adjust for the pigs' perversely complex fortifications?  For their switching building materials to concrete, wood... ice?  To work out by how much helmets improve the pigs' health and safety: exactly how much more damage helmeted pigs can take? 
Those pigs wearing crowns!           

But you seems so good at it.

It must take up a lot of energy.

...Why do you hate the pigs so much?