Oh dear

Whatever day I wrote “Slough of despair” on, when the vet proclaimed Bass, the dog ILL, our lives have turned upside down.

The dog was not just sick, but life threateningly sick. The vet discovered a massive bleed from the huge tumour on his spleen. We had a choice, of removing the spleen and tumour, and if we were lucky, the tumour would test benign. Dogs can live without a spleen if the tumour tests benign. But the kind of cancer that likes spleens, is usually frightfully aggressive and life expectancy after removal, is three to six months.

The vet offered to put him to sleep either immediately or if the tests were cancerous.

We have decided to gamble. Maybe we’ll get lucky. The tumour has been sent for testing. We’ll know in a few days.

So far, Bass has been a model patient since he came out of hospital.

He may not bark, walk, jump, go up or down stairs, get excited, be stressed, and a hundred other things I have forgotten for two weeks.

So far, he has been VERY good boy!

His owners on the other hand are pretty distraught.

The pongiest pong you ever ponged

Up here in the Lake District we have pongs.

The farmers are spreading so we know it’s going to rain.

The farmers are spreading so we know it’s going to snow.

There is cow poo, sheep poo, and “slurry”. I dont know what the hell “slurry” is. It’s all of that I think. The farmers seem to like it. They spread it so we can all enjoy the pong.

The pong wafts into car windows if you pass a spreaded field, and occasionally, a whiff is whiffed in the garden here. It’ll be raining or snowing in a few days. The pong is out there, somewhere else, not too close.

But yesterday, it arrived on my bed in the form of an over excited dog coming home from his walk. He rolled on my duvet, my pillows and sheets. The Furlongs leapt into action. We evacuated. Well, perhaps that’s not quite the right term.

We came back armed.

Mr Furlong ushered the pong into the shower where it got shampoo’ed.

Mrs Furlong stripped the bed completely with great moaning and gnashing of teeth.

The pong enjoyed it all. And the dog walker never indicated where she’d been yesterday morning with her dog team, but we knew.

As the bedding dried in the sun, a very faint whiff coming from the fields assailed our nostrils……slurry. The farmers are spreading. Its going to rain. Or maybe snow? You never know what to expect nowadays with Climate change and all.

But we already knew that. We got slurry first hand,

in our house.

The green frog

I wrote a blog post about a green plastic frog that used to disappear and reappear randomly all around our garden. It was a mystery. Until Bass the dog came bounding into our lounge with the green plastic frog in his mouth. He became so so obsessed with the plastic frog we had to take it away and I hid it in the shed.

But the other day I found it again and I thought it’s been years since Bass was smitten with the green plastic frog, he will have forgotten. So I put it carefully in the garden positioned artistically under a bush.

Well, guess what? The green plastic frog has disappeared again.

It has disappeared so very well to be unfindable. I know because I have had two sets of small grandchildren searching for it everywhere.

I know who has taken it, but he isn’t telling anyone where he has put it this time.

Rescue dogs and dreams

One day, in Africa at the till in a big hardware shop, I saw a woman carrying a back pack. Suddenly a little white furry dog face popped up from it. I had never seen such a dog before and was it case of love at first sight. It was a West Highland White.

A few years later we came back to the UK. I saw my dream dog everywhere. We needed a dog. We went to the local dog shelter and by chance the vet there said he knew of a dog that needed a home because the owner was afflicted with Lupus. He had the dog at his home just looking after it and we could go and see it whenever we wanted. So we went.

Well, guess what, I thought my Angels were shining on me. It was a beautiful pure bred West Highland White! We called her Grace. But at two, she developed a genetic skin condition which never lifted and was incurable. I paid my debt to the lords of Karma by nursing her devotedly for seven years. Somehow because she was ill, I loved her even more. I could never find the breeder to point out that breeding genetically malformed dogs was a crime. But the Kennel Club constantly got my opinion. Not long after that, a new law was passed in the UK that every breeder has to chip their dogs so ill-breeding can be tracked. I hope I had something to do with that.

We had Gracie put down on my lap on her favourite couch in our lounge in December 2008. Oh the grief!

After two lonely years, we properly adopted another rescue dog, a standard Yorkshire Terrier. We loved him but he was not without fault. I never completely trusted him with small children; he had a fixation with water and would disappear down river or out to sea unless on a long harness and leash. And he fought every dog he sniffed noses with. Life was jumpy with Bobby. He constantly needed bathing and clipping. Bobby lived to an old age and died shockingly quickly from a massive internal bleed that just happened after chasing balls (his favourite occupation) down the passage in our flat here.

After a lonely while, we got another rescue dog that looks like a Lancaster Heeler but isn’t. Bass is the name his previous owner’s gave him. Bass is the dog we have now. He is the best dog we have ever had. Apart from jumping on visitor’s laps when they sit on ‘his’ couch in our lounge, he loves every living thing. He came from a divorce. God knows what happened in his previous home. He gets frightened at angry voices, women screaming on TV, us packing suitcases or retrieving things from cupboards and sudden loud slapping sounds.

This morning Mr Furlong who is doing some woodwork in his shed, came into the kitchen and slapped a wooden block on the kitchen table unaware that that slapping sound triggered panic in the dog.

I don’t think Bass was ever hit, but I think he witnessed some really nasty violence.

How lucky we are that we all live in a home where none of that stuff happens.

Meet the neighbours

Mr Furlong and I have new neighbours.

For six months the flat next door has been empty. The story has been that it was snapped up by a couple in a midland town who had never even seen it. They bought it directly off the Internet. They bought it immediately it was listed.

Seems the story was true. They took six months to get here because of complications to selling their own house. British property laws must be the strangest and most medieval in the world! Nobody ever knows if the deal has gone through until the very day of moving. I have heard of people arriving at their new home behind the removal van, only to find the sale has fallen through for some technical reason, or delayed, and they have to find lodgings for themselves and all their furniture.

It’s insane.

So we have met the neighbours.

They shine much brighter than we do here in the neighborhood.

They are old just like the rest of us. They have brought with them blue ceramic pots very similar to ours, so our back gardens are going to ‘match’ They have put tall, elegant wire things up in the garden that might be bird feeders.

I have ascertained they have no pets of any kind, nor ever have had even though having had children. This might be a sign of a perculairity. But the bird feeders if they materialise, might absolve them from this defect.

They are cis white and retired teachers into fitness maybe. They ‘feel’ like Greens. There are no Greens here nor fitness practitioners. But cis white and retired teachers there are.

But (or should this be And?)

they WALK!

Yesterday they went for an early morning walk – a round trip of about six miles to a National Trust castle we have here. They are National Trust members evidently.

Am I right in guessing that it must have taken them over three hours to do this before anyone in this little neighborhood had even shuffled into their kitchens to make their morning coffees?

Oh no Mr Furlong, you forgot to ASK!

Our new neighbours have arrived. We haven’t seen them.

We saw the huge removal van in the road, as Bass, the dog, loudly pointed it out to us from our front window.

Our neighbours over the road actually saw the new owners.

Mr Furlong forgot to ask what they look like!

Are they old like the rest of us around here?

Are they thirty something?

Do they look as if they are simply making a rental holiday cottage for the Lake District?

The over the road neighbours said they seemed to have very little furniture….

Are they young and daft with super energy and vigour – enough to exhaust us all?

Have they got small children?

Dogs?

Cats?

Parrots?

We haven’t seen them at all and our gardens are adjacent.

I’ll tell you what they will think of us. We are sorting and about to tip trash. Our garden is a mess. I am ashamed. It has never looked so dreadful.

They are going to think they have moved in next door to squatters!

That is not a good start!

Concern

Yesterday was a bad day for me.

For years I have used my bed as my ‘office’. Everything that has to be done is done in the morning with a cup of coffee next to me and myself tucked in to bed, sitting up in a fashion comfortable for my wretched back. I write blogs, letters, replies, watch videos, social network, create in Night Café and follow the news in my bed. It’s routine.

I really enjoy my ‘office’. I’m in my office now.

It’s from here I watch the birds in our garden.

Sometimes I simply think in my office.

I’m up by lunchtime every day when I move to our lounge. Occasionally I have stayed dressed in my nighty but never in my bed all day. Recently, I have learned to get dressed first thing, as soon as I wake – and then get back into bed, fully dressed with that ordeal completed.

I don’t know what happened yesterday, but I felt very tired.

Extra tired.

So I lay back in bed instead of going through to the lounge as is my habit. And after lunch I fell asleep. Mr Furlong watched TV in the lounge without me.

My constant companion, Bass, the dog who lies next to me every morning, did the most perculiar thing.

Already we are used to him calling us with his calling-people-bark if we are not both in the lounge together by lunchtime, but yesterday he did what I consider to be an extraordinary act of concern.

He positioned himself on my pillow next to my sleeping head. And pushed with his snout under my shoulder. He repeated this over and over pushing me up, burrowing underneath my back, waking me up, communicating. Consciously, physically pushing me up.

He was communicating concern that I was not where I should be.

I checked my clock. It was three. Wow, very late for me.

And Bass didn’t like it.

He has us very well trained.

So I moved through to my chair in the lounge. And we all sat there happy and together again.

Dog watching me watching him.

At night now we have a new situation. The dog is not allowed on my bed while I’m sleeping. So, he watches me and should I get up in the night to go to the loo, he becomes very small and a unnoticeable in his little warm bed.

But I know he’s watching me.

He is watching me watching him.

He waits for me to settle back in bed, to get comfortable, to snuggle under the duvet.

As soon as he sees that I’m not looking at him he slithers out of his bed and jumps onto mine, burrowing under the small top blanket. Of course now I am comfortable and I’m not going to disturb myself to get the dog back into its own bed.

Last night I was reduced to using a torch instead of turning on my bedside light. I thought I would creep quietly out of the room do my business and creep back into bed without him noticing. But that doesn’t work.

I know it’s cold at night and it really is comfortable having a small dog nestling into to the back of your knees.

I pretend I haven’t noticed the dog on the bed by not looking at him. He doesn’t look at me. We both pretend it’s quite ordinary; that it’s allowed.

Bass though small , is quite a clumpy dog. You can feel it when he jumps on you, except in the night when he is light as a feather and quiet as a mouse.

And wiley too.

The fall of The White House

Mrs Furlong’s (that’s me) bedroom is cold at night because that’s the way I like it. In winter, unless it is minus 5, the window is open a crack to let fresh air in.

The dog sleeps in my room. No matter how I cover him, he will climb out of his bed on the floor in the corner and lie ON TOP of the covers. So, in the middle of the night, I have to phaff around covering the dog.

I had an inspiration at three am a week ago. I ordered a foldable, washable, cosy, indoor dog house thinking if there was a roof, it would protect Bass, the dog, from the window draught. It’s a beautiful dog house! We call it The White House because the frontage is white.

The dog hated it from the very first second he saw it.

Does it smell? Is it too dark inside? Is it too big? Is it too tall? Is it a threatening colour, shape, length, breadth, or what?

No.

It’s the roof. He hates the roof.

The roof, of course is the reason I bought it.

So we now have come to a compromise.

The old dog bed is jammed into The White House bottom which stops floor draught as it has sides. The roof stands folded at the back behind the peak of the back wall. And every night, I drape Bass’s favourite smelly, white blanket over it all forming a roof for the night. 

That has taken a week of diplomatic negotiation.

The present briefing is that the President of The White House is installed, despite The White House roof having now been dismantled. Sir has slept brilliantly under the old white blanket for three nights now.

And the staff are relieved.

Daylight Saving

One of the strangest habits the UK has, is the practice of Daylight Saving.

What part of Daylight are we saving?

Once, people and children walked to work or school in the barely light and came home in the dark. Now they go to school or work in the dark and come home in the getting dark, barely light.

Or is it Summer saving? I don’t  know what could be saved there. It is already bright at ten o’clock at night so people have to have black out blinds to get to sleep. And children go to bed in broad daylight.

And in the North here it’s even worse than the other part of England, the part that thinks they are the only ones on this Island.

So now everything not connected to the Internet needs the time changing. Including our dog Bass. He is going to be really confused about walk time, feeding time and bedtime. And, boy, he is going to TELL us that we are wrong and he is right for at least a week.

You can hoodwink a whole country, but not an intelligent dog.