Week 45: Who Froze Roger Rabbit?

Fate, Chaos and Pestilence are sitting on a log in one of the Circles of Hell pondering the upcoming, Annual Diablo Awards.

”Pestilence must be in line for the Lifetime Achievement. That pandemic has been pure genius, and to hit them with a new fast-spreading variant, just in time for the annual He-who-shall-not-be-mentioned-mas Day .... well, it was brilliant!”.

”Well thank you” said Pestilence, “Ah, ‘tis but a grain of sand on the black beach of Purgatory compared with the events Chaos has put in motion. I mean colouring a President Orange, injecting him with paranoia and delusion, and getting him to incite the country’s ”True Patriots” to storm the seat of government; remarkable!”

”But you know“ replied Chaos, “Without that little Constitutional Amendment allowing the masses to carry guns which Fate slipped in all those centuries ago, it wouldn’t have been half as effective. Although I did enjoy getting the more rabid of them to dress up in war-paint with dead animals on their heads. Fun! And let’s not forget that Fate has been meddling beautifully in the future of the UK, getting their Little President to sign a trade deal which looked good on paper, but is almost unworkable in practice. Ah, you can smell from here the rotting piles of fish that those Angry Fishermen thought that they could export to Europe. The real masterstroke though was getting the country’s tax authorities to implement a regime unlike any other, making it really hard for the Little Guy to send anything into or out of the country.“

”Maybe we should enter for the Team Award” says Fate. “Don’t forget how we’ve managed to meddle in the lives of that little family in Coulsdon on and off all year too. Small beer I know, but it’s the little things that can tip the balance”.

And dear chums, this week has seen the Demons meddling again. I was standing in our kitchen, a rather lovely extension which was completed six years ago, on the morning when we’d had a little covering of snow. Gin had gone to work (which contrary to popular belief isn’t at a drinks distributor; those days are long gone. These days she is more on the receiving end of the supply chain), GT (Girl Teenager) was in her room doing college stuff and BT (Boy Teenager) was asleep (because his sleep pattern is askew again having been kept awake by a horrible cough). It was quiet; even Milo (the hound) was snoozing. And then I heard it; an Unexpected Dripping sound. Now I don’t know about you, but I find Unexpected Dripping sounds rather disconcerting, particularly when you can see it isn’t coming from the tap. What‘s even more disconcerting is to follow the sound to the cooker-hood, where a little pool of water is dripping off of the top on to the cooker. The water appeared to be emerging from where the extractor vent goes out through the ceiling. I mopped it up and cursed. Drip .... drip ... drip. Bugger, there was Another Unexpected Dripping sound. After a lot of sodding about with torches trying to see whether water was coming in behind the American-style fridge-freezer, I worked out the noise was actually coming from the stair-passage next door. On closer inspection, there was a line of damp on the pipe box which hides the exit through the flat roof for the cooker-hood extractor pipe. Balls. Being an expert roofer, I clambered on to the flat roof and dollied about for a few minutes. Yep, it was a flat roof. Yep, there were various extractor vents. Nope, nothing obvious. Nothing for it, I would have to get Ray The Roofer in to take a look.

Ray The Roofer is a local expert and very highly regarded. He came. He saw. He pointed out that as the roof was made of fibreglass it would be almost impossible to identify the entry point of the water. Apparently there has been a fad for fitting fibreglass flat roofs, but the conditions for fitting such a roof are very specific (including temperature) and rarely met in the UK. Our roof having made it six years without a problem was “pretty good”. Ray said the only real solution would be to overlay it with a new rubber surface, which would be guaranteed for 20 years. Oh, and the builders had made a hash-up of half the lead flashing which would need to be replaced.

Oh good. Just what we need. An unexpected bill of most probably significant proportions when one of us is Economically Inactive. That Chaos fella has a lot to answer for.

Still, Milo has been a good boy this week, right? Well, no. He’s become a very wilful, teenage dog who has developed a sense of when the lead will go back on at the end of each walk. The little tyke has started a game of Jumping Away And Buggering Off at the allotted lead reinstatement time. He was so bad when out with Gin at the end of the week that he had her chasing after him for twenty minutes in a field in the dark. As she said, he’s lucky not to be there still. He also lives in hope on every walk of finding a stick which might be thrown for him to fetch (it won’t. I got fed up with being whacked in the back of the legs with muddy sticks so put an end to it. Doesn’t stop him trying of course). And so it was that Milo and I were out walking across a local golf course (as closed) on a beautiful, but very frozen morning. Milo was ranging about, chasing crows and finding the odd stick for me to ignore. And then he stopped, very interested in something in the grass. He picked it up and started to carry it towards me. “Weird looking stick” I thought. And then “Wait a minute! That stick has legs!“ and “Oh God ... an entrail hanging out”. Bloody hell, he’d found a frozen rigid, whole, dead rabbit. And he was hammering across the fairway with it in manner that suggested he wanted to play Fetch with it. Despite it being utterly futile, I issued the command “Leave” ... he didn’t. “Milo! LEAVE!”. Nope. Bound, bound, bound, whack! Straight into the back of my legs with his Bunnsicle. Whack! “Come on owner, throw my Bunnsicle for me!”. Whack! The owner at this point was wondering how on earth he was going to get rid of said Bunnsicle (you can’t throw it away, it will be brought straight back!) when a large, Boxer dog lolloped over, nicked it and scarpered. I could hear his owner desperately shouting “LEAVE!” as Milo and I sauntered off up the fairway.

No one mentions this stuff before you buy a dog you know. They tell you it’s hard work, and training is a life-time of effort. But frozen Bunnies? Nah.

But good news! The days of being economically inactive may be shorter than we had first anticipated. Milo the hound has opened up the possibility of running a dog walking business. A modest earner, but nonetheless why not make a few quid whilst out with our own errant hound? Better still, one of Gin’s chum’s has all the kit, including a Pet Ambulance (van) which she wishes to sell. Being designated an ambulance, the van can be used for transporting peoples' dogs for walks, pets to and from the vets, and ex-pets from the vets to crematorium. If we can find a crap vet, the latter could be quite lucrative. So we are going to give it a go, BT and I, probably from early summer. I’ve been trying to come up with a name for the business, but so far BT has banned “The Van of Dogging” and “Doggy Style”. Gin suggested “One Man And His Dogs”, but as there are two of us ... (she teaches maths you know). I then thought to pick something related to favourite bands or music, but BT seems to think that “Another One Bites The Dust” will convey the wrong image. We’ll keep trying; no doubt something will appeal.

It also transpires that to be a Professional Dog Walker one should have qualifications in Canine First Aid. And so I am embarking (woof! See what I did there) on a diploma qualification in exactly this. 150 hours of study on a course provided by Blue Circle. No wait, that‘s the cement lot; Blue Cross, the animal welfare charity. And this means I will be scaling back the blog. The timing is fortunate as it’s proving increasingly hard to write as not a lot has been happening. And so chums, I will move this to fortnightly or perhaps monthly, depending on what’s going on and how well the Canine studies are going.

So there we go. 12 months ago if anyone had said our lives would have gone in this direction, I would have laughed. But you know, I like the way it’s heading.

Love & elbow-grease,

Mr H

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