Week 27: All Creatures Great And Small

“Arrrrgghhh! What the hell is that? It’s massive! ARRGGGHHH!”

It’s 1.45am. BT (Boy Teenager) is making his way to bed via the shower. A nighttime shower is a relatively recent thing, born out of the heatwave and continued as he ”feels less sticky” in bed. For a lad that six months ago would hardly go near water (unless there were tropical fish, a reef and he was adorned in snorkelling gear), this is a Very Good development. Shame it isn’t at 9am, but hey.

I leap out of bed to wrestle the cause of BT’s distress to the floor. He’s in the bathroom, butt naked, pointing at the furry mat thing that keeps your feet warm when you get out of the shower.

“It’s a HUGE bug” he says, “I don’t know what it is! Get rid of it, get rid of it!”.

”I can’t see anything?” I reply. Because I can’t. The mat is a sort of fluffy, white affair. I can see a small black spot, but that’s it.

”He’s burrowed in” says BT. “Look, that black spot”.

With some trepidation I poke the black spot, expecting my finger to be taken off by a Greater Crested Deathroach. It doesn’t move. I poke it again and again until it get’s sufficiently annoyed to make an appearance.

I back off, expecting an imminent demise from whatever this new species of fatal bug is.

It’s an Earwig. A big one, granted, but an earwig all the same.

BT is beside himself. “What is it, what is it? Get rid of it!”

”It’s an earwig, They are harmless“

I may be lying at the point as I’ve always thought the ugly little buggers can bite.

“How shall I get rid of it?”

”Squash it!”.

Well no, I don’t kill things unless I am going to eat them (and then I leave the Killing, Packaging and Delivery to someone else). So, dear reader, I take my life in my hands, get the Earwig on to a sheet of toilet roll and chuck him down the stairs.

I don‘t like bugs, especially ugly ones. They give me the heebie-jeebies a bit. Even the harmless ones in the UK (don‘t start me on False Widows). I wonder where BT get’s his bug-dread fear from?

For BT this week has been all about animals. He has firmly settled on wanting a dog, and is already planning on meeting his mates before school in the morning when he takes the hound out for a walk. BT is finding his mates‘ return to school challenging (it causes him to think and worry about his future, which is understandable when he still can‘t face formal learning or exams), so having a reason to go see his mates every day as part of a routine is such a good idea. We are completely sold on it. When I say we, GT (Girl Teenager) isn’t quite so sold. Given the choice, she would sell BT before accepting a dog into the house. She is scared of dogs, and worried about how the cat will react. This is also our worry. He is a furry thug and I fear the vet bills we will incur each time the dog’s nose gets taken off. Nonetheless, the pros far outweigh the cons and the Great Dog Hunt has begun.

Dog hunting rookie error number one: I mention that labradors have a lovely temperament before I’ve looked up the price of dogs. BT is utterly taken by them, although the candidate has to be cream coloured as “black ones look clapped” (which I believe means “not very good”). Alright then, a cream Labrador puppy. All good. Search engines fired up.... Go!

Holy Mary Mother of God, £2,000! Two Thousand Quid. For a puppy. I try to change BT’s mind, but he has inherited the Stubborn Gene from the male side of my family. Nope, it has to be under age of one and a cream Labrador (or at least one needs to have been involved in the makings of it).

We decide to look at Dog Rescue sites. These are great if you want a bulldog or greyhound, a staffie or some other aggressive, skittish type of dog. Less so for ones of gentle nature. Then BT finds him. His name is Claude. He is a lab-cross and 7 months old. He is lovely. He even gets on with cats.

He is also in Bahrain.

It will cost £950 to buy him and receive him. And that is if the Rescue trust that finds and saves these doggos thinks we are suitable. So now we wait whilst they process our application (two weeks) and continue to search in case we are declined. Still, gives me time to repair the holes in the garden fences and move anything chewable above shoulder height.

GT has had a good week. She’s started her new College and has already got herself two friendship groups. She’s really enjoying using her brain again and we are optimistic that the new environment will really suit her. Naturally on her first day she dressed from head to toe in black, went full Goth on the make-up and tousled her hair to make herself look something like a cross between Robert Smith (The Cure) and Siouxsie Sioux (Siouxsie & The Banshees). It’s so far removed from being in school doing GCSEs and I love the fact that she dresses how she wants and is happy to be different. So far so good!

But what about Lady Gin? (so called because she keeps an emergency stash in her car’s glove-box). She’s returned to school full time and is very happy for that, even though she has to deep-clean her class room between lessons and comply with a number of other Covid-friendly changes which have added 25% percent to her workload. After only a few days, we’ve already lost her most evenings and for half the weekend as she marks and preps and does the things that a teacher has to do.

And me? Well I’ve become a Responsible Cook; we’ve only eaten meat once (Bharat and Lemon lamb with sweet potato. Cor blimey it was good. I use a recipe book called Great British Chefs for our fancy-dan meals, and Oh my the recipes are mostly spectacular!). A week of vegetable pies, pasta, fish and more vegetables. None of it boring (Ottolenghi’s Plenty More cookbook is a modern wonder of non-meat cooking) and all of it massively wind-inducing. Who knew?

I’ve also spent the week getting frustrated with the Anti-Mask Brigade and have waded into Twitter threads of like-minded numpties who think it’s a serious infringement of their liberties. Really? Not as big an infringement as being locked-down due to a second wave. Helping to reduce the risk of people dying is apparently not worth the inconvenience of wearing a mask either. They justified this by telling me that the death rate os 0.065% (the fact that there is a death rate at all seems to evade them), that it’s not Covid that’s the problem, it’s the Flu Jab (cause and effect also evading them; none seem to consider that the population most vulnerable to Covid are also most likely to receive a flu jab and the two things are not related) and that it’s “not fair on the kids” (losing a parent or grandparent also isn’t very fair). The best though was a simple reply “You are stupid” Yeah I can be a bit daft and definitely forgetful, but generally Not That Stupid. Must be a bit though because I really can’t see why wearing a mask for short periods is so difficult.

Anyway, before I give myself another aneurism over this subject, Postie has just delivered the gear for me to patch the holes in the fence. Best had, just in case we pass the test and Claude is incoming from the Middle-East.

Love and elbow-grease,

Mr H

x

PS If Claude is incoming from the Middle-East, the first thing he will need to get used to is a new name.