Our adventures in Heathrow Airport (tl;dr, I expect)

On Friday, October 1st, Mrmonkey and I left our house in cheery spirits ready for our two-week trip to Seattle and San Francisco. Not a holiday (as I'm slightly weary of explaining to people now), this is a necessary work trip for the monkey and I'm just tagging along because I can because all my work happens by magic laptop now, so it doesn't matter where in the world I am as long as I have an Internet connection.

Annoyingly, though, when we got to Dublin airport it became apparent that our flight to Heathrow was delayed. Never mind, said Mrmonkey, they'll just stick us on a flight to Vancouver or something when we get to Heathrow, and we'll still reach Seattle tonight. When we boarded the Aer Lingus flight (EI 164, the 12.10 flight, which seems to get delayed a fair bit, in case you're interested, and generates its share of customer complaints), we were told by the flight attendants that everyone who had bags checked all the way through to their destination should go to Flight Connections in Terminal 5, where they would be rebooked onto a later flight to get them where they needed to go. Only those who had NOT checked their bags all the way through should stay in Terminal 1 and go to the Aer Lingus desk. So, off with us to Terminal 5 on the special bus that Aer Lingus had arranged to whisk us there. Oh yes.

We joined the BA queue at Flight Connections. We didn't think there was anything suspicious about this, because, after all, we were on a BA codeshare flight from Dublin, which meant that BA had booked seats on the Aer Lingus flight for their customers, so we were flying under the BA umbrella the whole time, right? After about 20 minutes of standing in the queue, the guy behind us asked a BA staff member if there was a different queue we could stand in. He said that there was, but it was about four hours long. "Four hours!" we all said, "hoo, don't want to stand in that then!"

Four and a half hours later we reached the top of the queue. I won't bore you with the ins and outs of the actual queuing. Yes, someone from BA did give out some phone numbers for BA customer service to see if they could help us, but they couldn't do anything except say "you should stay in the queue, we don't have any information." Yes, after about three hours someone did come along with one bottle of water for each person in the queue. Yes, a pane of glass did get smashed after some people tried to skip the queue and a staff member stopped them. But the important thing is, we made it to the top of the queue without anyone triaging the queue to see if everyone in it was actually in the right place.

The woman who was dealing with the people to the left of us apologised to them for the long wait when they reached her. Our woman said "oh, you're booked on two separate booking references," small sigh, "it's more convenient for us when people are booked on a single reference."

What I didn't say because I didn't want to get booted out of the queue and possibly arrested: "Well, it's more convenient for us not to have to stand in a queue for four and a half hours with no apology or explanation, but hey, we all have our crosses to bear."

The woman then said she could get us on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt on Sunday, but Aer Lingus don't have an agreement with Lufthansa and... you could almost see the hey-wait-a-minute look in her eyes as she said "in fact, you should be talking to the Aer Lingus desk. Your delay has nothing to do with us."

We pointed out to her that it was a codeshare flight and we were booked BA the whole way, with BA flight codes and everything.

"Doesn't matter," she said, "you'll have to go back to Terminal 1 and talk to Aer Lingus."

So we took the half hour bus ride back to Terminal 1 and found the Aer Lingus duty manager. A more sour-faced woman I have never seen outside of a film about the Magdalen Laundries. She listened to our tale of woe and, without a single expression of sympathy or word of apology or admission that Aer Lingus had somehow fucked up, she told us we could fly back to Dublin tonight, go home, and re-present ourselves at Dublin airport at 6am the following morning for a flight to Charles de Gaulle and on to Seattle from there, or we could stay in Heathrow until Sunday and take a flight to Chicago and then on to Seattle. She was unmoved by tears and provided an absolutely stellar model of the new customer service paradigm of staring stony-faced at the customer until they stop talking, before doing the bare minimum required by law.

She wrote out coupons for a cheap hotel in the airport, meals, and the shuttle bus to and from the hotel. "And our bags will be delivered over there tomorrow?" I said. She said no. If we wanted our bags we would have to go back to Terminal 5 and get them. She would not provide bus tickets for us to do that. If we wanted the bags, we would have to pay the £4 each way bus fare from the hotel to get them.

Then Mrmonkey checked the boarding passes she had handed us and pointed out that they were for economy, when we had paid for premium economy seats. She said that United doesn't have a premium economy class, so we just had to have economy seats. So, fuck the extra money you paid for your ticket, basically. Aer Lingus couldn't give a shit. She then presented Mrmonkey with a slip of paper on which was written the mailing address and fax number of the Aer Lingus customer complaints department. There is no phone number. You may not call them.

We went back to the hotel, ate a crappy meal, watched some of Some Like it Hot, (I'm not glad at all that Tony Curtis died, but if he hadn't there wouldn't have been anything at all worth watching on the telly, so thank you Tony Curtis), and went to bed. At four in the morning I had to shout at people in the hallway to shut up so we could go back to sleep.

The next day Mrmonkey set out to get our bags and see what he could do about the flights. There was no point in my going with him, because I would just get us thrown out of the airport, so I stayed behind in the hotel to do work. He left the hotel at about 10am, and returned at 3pm. His tale was one of adventure, more lies and incompetence from airline staff (he went to Terminal 5 to get the bags and was told that they had been transferred to Terminal 1. So he went to Terminal 1 (bear in mind that this takes half an hour each time) to be told that they were definitely in Terminal 5, and he was given the name of the person to talk to. He went back to Terminal 5, and yes, they were there.)

But it was also a tale of hope. It was a tale of one woman, Emma, who wasn't at the end of her Friday shift and therefore the end of her rope. It was a tale of someone who has not yet learned the ways of modern customer service and still thinks that it's about trying to help the customer instead of trying to make the customer give up and go away. She agreed with Mrmonkey that the Aer Lingus staff had, in fact, probably just been trying to get rid of everyone, which is why they sent them over to Terminal 5. She said that all airlines do this. They just try to get rid of you for now, and if you come filtering back like a homing pigeon, well then, they'll deal with you because you're obviously some masterpiece of Darwinianism who deserves to be flown to another destination. She made several phone calls which involved her talking to actual people instead of just tapping on her computer, and she summoned us up two seats in the class we had paid for, on the Sunday version of the flight we were meant to have been on in the first place.
She emphasised to Mrmonkey the importance of going to an actual ticket desk instead of just a kiosk. She might be the greatest human currently working in Heathrow Airport.

The next day, we presented ourselves at Terminal 5 to check in for our flight, and stood in the queue of people. Within seconds, a uniformed staff member came over to check that we were in the right queue. I realised that this level of care was because this queue was in a public part of the airport where customers from other airlines could see us, and where people who might be making flight decisions in the future could see us from outside. The queue in Terminal 5 at Flight Connections, however, is not, which is why nobody cares at all if you are stuck in it for four and a half hours. Everyone in there is already a BA customer. They don't have to buy you flowers, they've already shagged you (copyright ComedyB). Which is also why Aer Lingus sent us there, so they wouldn't have a massive queue of people standing at their customer-facing desks in Terminal 1.

In the end, we were bumped to business class.

"Lucky you," some people said. I don't think we were lucky. No air passenger is lucky anymore. Because this is the real cost of low-cost airlines. Sure, people like Michael O'Leary can crow about all the "frills" they've managed to cut back on, but by choosing to always fly low-cost, people have driven other airlines, like Aer Lingus, to go the same way. So instead of customer service staff you have stony-faced evil nun types who won't even/aren't authorized to even give you a lousy extra £4 bus ticket so you can go and collect your bags when something goes wrong with your flight and you have to be rebooked (never mind having the bags delivered to your hotel within the bloody airport). This is why the queue in Flight Connections is four and a half hours long. If you search for stories similar to ours you'll see that this queue is always that long, because of the number of staff that are working on it at any one time. See all those people in the business class queue who are zipping along and being seen inside ten minutes? They used to be you, before airlines decided that you didn't want to pay for all these behind-the-scenes "frills".

The thing that makes me angry about this whole episode is not that this shouldn't have happened to us, it's that it shouldn't have happened to anyone, but it does, because this is business as usual for airlines now. This is how it is now when anything goes wrong. There's no spare capacity or spare staff or money to pay overtime. It's all bare bones operations, which means that instead of being put on a New York flight while we were still in Dublin on Friday, we ended up in Heathrow till Sunday.

And I haven't even told you about Saturday night yet.

It's been nearly a year

I moved from my (posssibly greatest ever) job of abstracting articles from periodicals like The Economist and CQ Weekly--and hey, let's not forget Russian Social Science Review--to writing marketing copy almost a year ago. During that year, I have slipped back into my old ways of essentially not really picking up much about the world beyond what I hear on Radio 4 or see on The Daily Show.

Apart from the three years I spent doing that job (which is the longest I've ever spent doing the same job), I've never been a reader of newspapers or magazines, nor much of a consumer of world events. But I enjoyed knowing things about the world, about who was in charge, what countries were in political turmoil, whose elections were going to be close and whose were more or less fixed. I liked spending five or six hours a day just reading and learning about politics and protest movements, world events and medical developments, sociological theory and environmental catastrophes. It made my brain work in a way that it has only ever done before when I was studying, because I wasn't just reading magazine articles, I was reading the academic journals as well.

Now that I don't get to read that stuff for work any more, I just don't read it, in the same way that if I stopped going to Motivation in two weeks when my 20 weeks is up, I know I would put back on all the weight I've lost. You can't just unlearn in a short time the habits it took you a lifetime to pick up. It takes application and work.

It came as a shock to me recently to discover that Álvaro Uribe is no longer president of Colombia. How can that be? (I actually know how that can be. See above.) I have no idea how things are going to go in the midterm elections in the U.S. this year. It feels a bit weird.

I miss that job. I don't learn anything new in this job.

I miss Álvaro.

David O'Doherty/Anthony Jeselnik/Arj Barker last Sunday

What else would we be doing on a Sunday afternoon anyway, David O'Doherty asks us all, other than sitting in a temporary mosque in a garden in Dublin listening to some comedy? What indeed. David O'Doherty is the ideal man to host a gig like this. He points out himself that his credentials are impeccable, given that he often does readings for children in libraries, and they mainly take place during daylight. Plus he just has that kind of comedy that lends itself to the daytime. Sure, he has some strong opinions, but unlike a lot of other comics, those opinions are not really about porn or sexual positions or how hateful women are, but about Shakira and how great bicycles are because they just stay up on their own by magic, and about pandas and what panda-related facts may or may not be true. He looks completely at home and everyone happily goes with him on the stories of personal frustration and childhood non-trauma.

Arj Barker isn't far off being this kind of comedian either, although he does look more like a night-timer who's been woken up and pushed on stage before being given his breakfast. He brings plenty of laughs with his stories about Avatar, Internet scams, and this own unique view of global warming and environmental disaster. He gets a couple of nice local references in, and in general does enough to make any right-thinking person want to see his full show.

And sandwiched in between these two easy talkers was Anthony Jeselnik. He's the other type of comedian. He speaks in short sentences, and waits for laughs. He waits too long. The laughs don't really come. I imagine him as a contributor to Sunday Miscellany and that's amusing for about two minutes till he tells a joke that nobody laughs at and suggests that we were offended. Sometimes we're not offended. Sometimes you're just not funny.

That is the problem with these three-comic bills. Of course the other problem with festivals is that your MC might come back and suggest that everyone go over to the big tent and beat up Des Bishop, just because he's in the big tent. And that's a lot of effort for a Sunday afternoon.

Hilarity in the Iveagh Gardens

The Carlsberg Comedy Carnival has just finished its fourth run, and I pronounce it a success. Sure, none of the gigs I attended on Sunday were sold out (how does Emo Phillips not sell out? What is wrong with people?) but Saturday was chockers, and everyone seemed to be in very good spirits.

The festival's two main selling points for comedians, as far as I can see, are that it's just before Edinburgh, so they can get in that one last polish of their material before their Edinburgh shows, and that (unlike Kilkenny) there is a dedicated space for the comedians and their mates to sit and get a drink without having people coming up to them all the time. I wouldn't like to give the impression that comedians don't like people approaching them, nor would I like to suggest that people are assholes about it, but if you're getting ready to go onstage, or you've just come off stage, sometimes you just want to be somewhere where you can relax a bit and not be 'on', and the organizers of this festival get that.

You also can't get into the Iveagh Gardens at all unless you have a ticket to at least one of the shows. Once you're in, you can hang out all day and eat burgers or crepes and drink as much €5 Carlsberg as your stomach can hold, but the cordon does prevent the place from being flooded with extra people.

I did also see some actual gigs while I was there, but I will talk about them later.

Kids, eh?

For about a year now, I've been walking a dog belonging to some neighbours of mine. This happened by chance: I was walking my own dogs on the beach one day and I met a woman and a friendly, extremely fat labrador. We got talking, and her dog was nice, and she asked me if I ever looked after other people's dogs, and it turned out that her foster parents were looking for someone to look after the friendly, extremely fat labrador in her own home for two weeks while they went on holidays.

Normally I don't like the idea of dogs being left alone for long periods of time in their own homes, but I was assured that she was used to it, so I agreed, and every day for two weeks I took her out with my own dogs for a long walk, which she loved. When the two weeks were up, I hadn't the heart to leave her to her fatness, so I said I would keep walking her as long as it was convenient. A year later, I'm still doing it. Last week, however, the neighbours' grandchild, a ten-year old boy, came to stay with them for three weeks. So now I seem to be walking him as well.

It's fine, because it's an hour out of my day and what do I really care, right? Plus he loves the dogs and they really like him, and I remember when I was his age some childless adults were really good at giving up their time to me as well, so I don't mind.

But this morning he lost my ball thrower. He was throwing the ball for the dogs, he put the ball thrower down in some shallow water close to the shore, and it just vanished. Swallowed by the seaweed and the current and a child's inability to really concentrate on looking for something properly. I took off my shoes and rolled up my trousers and waded in to look for it, and when I looked up five minutes later he was a dot on the horizon, with all five dogs crowded around him and all heading towards some people who had children but no dogs. So I gave up my ball thrower, put my shoes back on, and followed him.

There isn't really a point to this story, except to remind me that this is what life is like every second of the day for people who have kids. It's just constant wrangling. Mind you, I never would have thought to bring home so many greenish crab claws if he hadn't been with me, so I suppose I won in the end, really.

Women of Size! Remain Indoors!

If you are not a fat woman, you have no idea what it's like trying to buy fat-woman clothes. I'm not going to bore you with a discussion of whether or not it's sensible for Evans to sell skirts that are almost wider than they are long, nor will I get into a debate about whether fat women should really wear sleeveless t-shirts. I'm not even going to whine on about how Anne Harvey appear to think that everyone must dress like a mother of the bride all the time. Those things are a matter of taste. But I'll tell you this much: if you are a fat woman, you better get used to your clothes being wet, because nobody in Dublin is going to sell you a coat that keeps you dry.

And even those nice people on the Internet who specialize in selling the kind of fat-lady garments it's impossible to get in actual shops in Ireland have failed me on the one thing I need above everything else to get through the Irish summer: a light, waterproof, hooded jacket. A cagoule/kagoul/pac-a-mac kind of thing. It's all I want. I want to tie it around my waist and go out walking with the dogs, and when it rains I want to pull the jacket over my head and be dry, but not absolutely baked. I got one from Lands End a couple of years ago, but it's no longer waterproof and they no longer sell that type of jacket. I have an Outdoor Scene jacket that almost, almost fits, and in a month or so it will fit, but it doesn't fit yet and it's raining now and I have to go and walk the dogs in it now.

I've searched everywhere. My friend in Seattle thinks she might have tracked down what I'm looking for, so I'm going to order one and see if it's the right thing, but if I didn't have a friend in Seattle helping me to find these things, what would I do? Just fucking get wet? That's not right, surely. I can't be the only fat woman in Ireland who ever goes out in the rain, so how come I seem to be the only one who ever needs a summer raincoat?

I know, I know, first world problems.

We're going to hang out the washing

One of the things I genuinely love about Evelyn Cusack is that she will tell you when there's going to be good drying out, so you can get loads of washing done before the good drying goes away. When we moved into this house, I felt like a real homeowner for the very first time because mrmonkey put up a washing line for me, and I have been using it on every Evelyn-approved day ever since. For me, one of the simple, idle pleasures of working from home is sitting at my desk looking out the window at my neighbours' washing flapping in the breeze. You can see which houses have girls living in them: everything's pink. You can see who goes to which school in the area by the uniforms. You can tell when there's been a washing disaster because everything's dyed the same slightly washed-out lilac, although that happens more and more rarely in this age of colour catchers and polyblends. And you can see who's been buying the recycled pegs from the local supermarket (they're crap, by the way. They just give up and drop off the line after a couple of weeks, like fatigued fledglings).

And you can see changes in towel technology. Right now, as I type this, I'm looking at a kid's changing towel. It's basically a long towel with a hole in the middle, old-fashioned poncho style. When I first saw it on the line I thought, wow, what an amazing leap forward in towel technology! Pop the towel over the child's head and they are completely covered and have both hands free for changing! And then I thought, hang on, that's just a towel with a hole in it. Given how often my mother cut holes in sheets to make ghost costumes (or shepherds for nativity scenes), or blankets to make cowboy costumes, why did she never think to cut a hole in a towel to make one of these? When I think of the times... well, you get the picture.

Of course, some brief discussion with my friends reveals that several of them had these things when they were growing up. Some of them even had ones with hoods. So now my mother's really in for it.

Still, at least my deprived childhood is over now. Imagine if you were an adult and you lived in your own house that you paid for, and you were prohibited from hanging your washing on a line outside your back door? I'd call that really deprived. And that is the fate of (maybe) thousands of Americans right now. I saw a thing about it on Colbert. There's even a campaign to get people to line dry again in the U.S. Don't say I don't do my research. 

Right, I can hear the washing machine winding down. Time to hang those clothes out.

28 Days Later

Remember this picture?

That's me and Widger, the smallest one of the box of the puppies. So called because he liked to sleep all the time, cried if anyone woke him up, and was (still is) my favourite of them all. Well, here is Widger this morning, almost exactly four weeks after I got him:

Yes, that's quite a difference. In fact, the two pups we have left here are edging up on being the same size as Trixie, although they're still quite a bit lighter. They're eight weeks old now, an age at which many people still get their first puppy from a less scrupulous breeder (ten to twelve weeks is ideal), and they're really beginning to, well, get on my fucking nerves.

The noise is incredible. All day long. They growl and yelp and bark at each other as they wrestle around the garden, so when I need a break I stuff puppy Kongs with kibble and gravy and give them to them in their den. That lasts about two minutes, before Widger gets frustrated with his own inability to extract the food from his Kong, so he decides to shove Bunty off her Kong, which causes a fight. So I separate them, putting her outside the pen and him inside. That gives another ten minutes of peace until one of them finishes their Kong and wants to rejoin the other one, which gives rise to more barking and whining. So I pop the two of them in the den together with their chew toys and leave the room. This makes them bark and bark and bark and bark and bark and bark and bark until they eventually fall asleep. This lasts half an hour to an hour, before the whole cycle starts again.

I cannot wait until they have their shots and they can go for walks. I am a great believer in the maxim, "a knackered dog is a quiet dog".

I've long been of the opinion that it's better to get an adult dog than a puppy, and now I know I was right. Sure, you miss out on weeks of cuteness with an adult dog, but they're usually housetrained, you can start walking them straight away, and they can generally figure out fairly quickly how to get food out of a rubber container.

You'll also notice I haven't had any sleep, nor have I had a haircut in four weeks.

EDITED TO ADD: I do still love them, though. Like, really a lot. Now sssh, let's go and do some work while they have forty widgers. Sshh.

All good things go to Sweden

The puppies are going to Sweden in a few weeks, as soon as they get their vaccinations. Because everything goes to Sweden eventually.

I've said I won't be driving them to the airport. I can't take a repeat of my upset over Woody.

Here are some puppy pictures to be going on with.

Changing habits

Experts tell you things all the time, but sometimes you just don't believe them, so you carry on doing things the way you did before, even though that's the opposite of what they've told you to do.

You don't believe, for example, that because you've been eating certain things your whole life in a certain way that you can never change and develop new tastes. You also don't believe that it is possible to toilet train two eight-week old puppies with praise and treats. Surely that's too young?

Turns out that sometimes, just sometimes, if you follow the advice on the website and you listen to your CDs and go to your appointments and stick to the eating plan that's been devised for you, several things are possible.

First, you can wake two eight-week old puppies up after their forty widgers, call them to follow you outside, tell them to pee and poo in the right spot of the back yard, and they follow you and they pee and poo where you tell them to, and you treat them and praise them and they are pleased enough to do it again the next time. Amazing. Not only that, but they now sit on command and come when we call them. At eight weeks! (They do still pee in the kitchen if we leave them unattended for more than 90 minutes, but they hardly poo any more.)

Second, after a month of hardly drinking tea, and then only black tea, you end up having a cup of tea with a tiny amount of cow's milk in it and it tastes like someone's dumped a big load of liquid cheese in your tea. Bleucch. Thirty years I've been drinking tea and enjoying it (before then people insisted on putting sugar in it, and it was horrible), and now it turns out I don't drink my tea black because I'm on a diet, I drink my tea black because I like it that way.

Third, you can order Chinese food and, instead of having a spring roll followed by a main course (often with chips instead of rice) and a bag of prawn crackers, you can have just a main course, and not even eat the rice, and feel perfectly satisfied with that.

Also that clicking noise in your hip starts to diminish and bending down to wash your feet in the shower in the morning doesn't make you want to throw up because your back hurts so much. Good times.

Treats and Rewards

If you've never met me, you'll perhaps be unaware of the fact (but unsurprised to learn) that I am a person of fatness. And not, like, regular muffin-top fatness, but actual proper fatness.

Long story short, I'm embarked on the process of doing something about it, for what I swear is going to be the last time. Three weeks into this current effort and everything is going fine, except that my counsellor (I would say "diet lady", but I'm trying to think of the way I eat now as basically the way I will eat for all time, because that's how you do it, really) has set me a task that I'm finding quite difficult.

"List ten non-food, non-booze rewards or treats."

Why is that hard? Because I get as far as this:

1) Have a nap.
2) Daydream about telly people I have crushes on.

And then I get no further. I know what's expected here. What's expected is a list like this:

1) Have a nap.
2) Have the daydreaming.
3) Get a manicure/pedicure.
4) Get someone in the beauty industry to smear gunk on some ungunked part of me.
5) Have my hair done.
6) Buy a new book.
7) Buy some new shoes.
8) Have a massage.
9) Light a scented candle.
10) Have a bath.

And that was the list I was going to go with until I started giving this some serious consideration, just to keep the counsellor happy (I know that's not how counselling works, but sometimes doing it any other way creates too much anxiety, which makes me want to eat). Nevertheless, that is a crap list for someone like me. I don't like being rubbed or gunked or handled except for medical or conjugal purposes, so that's all out. And I don't like baths, they are boring. And I was hoping that this new, healthier eating lifestyle would result in me buying less crap, not more, different crap.

So what are my treats and rewards?  This was the list I finally came up with, after some careful consideration.

Everyday treats:

•  Have a nap.
•  Put on McAlmont & Butler's "Yes" and sing along.
•  Lie on the bed, put "Hoppipolla" on the headphones and make a little daydream video.
•  Give away one thing I can't stand but have been keeping because someone I like gave it to me.
•  Re-read my favourite passages in books I've already read (this reduces the risk that the book might be crap). 

Big treats:

•  Have the car valeted, and don't clean it out beforehand or anything.
•  Get a dogwalker to walk the dogs, and do not use the time to read animal rescue message boards or do any housework.
•  Buy a bubble machine and some bacon-flavour bubbles and watch the dogs play with it.

That's all the things I can think of for now that could be considered equivalent to things like eating half a packet of Viscounts, or getting a Chinese in and having chips instead of rice, or the other things that I have always considered treats but which, let's face it, haven't turned out to be such treats in the end. Obviously there are bigger things, like going places for the weekend and so on. But I'm pleased with that start. It gets me away from the traditional "women be shoppin' and smearin'" idea, and that's important.

And now I've done my homework, I deserve a little treat. So do you, if you've read this far.

You're welcome.

Pupdate!

As you can see, we still have the puppies.

In the last day or so, though, they've come on hugely in the independence stakes. They're playing with each other a lot more and are a lot less dependent on cuddling up to a human for comfort. This is good news, because it means I don't have to wait for them to be fast asleep in order to leave them and go off to do other things, such as showering and doing actual work for which I get paid.

They do still like a lap to lie on when they're actually ready to go to sleep, though, and will cry for one of us to come in and sit with them for a few minutes while they drop off. That's fine.

Worms appear to be abating as well. Everyone's belly, including Widger's, seems to be taking on a more normal shape, and everyone's got more energy.

They'll be starting tiny puppy vaccinations this week, which basically means getting teeny tiny doses of parvo vax in order to ensue they don't get accidentally infected before they are old enough to have their proper vaccinations. This will necessitate many visits to the rescue's vet, who is 45 minutes away from here. Oh well. There goes this weekend as well.

They are so lovely though, and it's lovely to see them getting stronger and more confident every day. I'm glad we took them on. Puppies were always such a mystery to me before, and I'm glad we had a relatively easy and healthy litter in first to practice on.

Puppywatch-day three

We now have four puppies.

When the rescue was originally contacted about the wee yokes, they were told that the puppies were between eight and ten weeks old, which is a good age to start separating them. So one of the other volunteers agreed to take one, and I would take the others. But the mistake was discovered and rectified, and now we have all the puppies together with us.

They're visibly growing every day, if not in size, in health and confidence. We had them out the back yard this morning for about five minutes and they ran around barking excitedly and trying to eat weeds, which is a far cry from the three terrified mites I got on Friday. They're also separating into two separate groups to sleep, or even napping by themselves, which they wouldn't do unless they felt safe.

We have named them.

L-R: Dobby (male), Widger (male, formerly Runty) and Bunty (female).

We've called the other one Tarka, but I don't have a picture of her yet. She's very collie-looking.

Because you asked for them

More puppy pictures!

Here's littlest pup calling the others back to bed because he's sleepy now.

Here's biggest pup investigating her middle brother.

Here's littlest pup all asleep.

And here's biggest pup stridin' out.

Eventful Day

So much for today's plans. My intention was to make the most of my manager's absence from work today (I am going to work tomorrow instead) to do my supermarket shopping and visit my friend in the hospital. She has had some fairly serious oral surgery and is going to be in hospital for at least a week, so I wanted to go. I was all set. Walk the dogs, come home, have a shower, take the bus to Dublin.

Then Trixie vanished halfway through the walk. Figuring she'd gone down a rabbit hole again, I waited around for her, but she didn't emerge. So I walked back to where I'd last seen her. No sign. To cut a very long and panicky story short (in which our heroine dashes about the sand dunes clutching at strangers and begging them for news of her feeble one-eyed dog) I eventually drove all the other dogs home in order to get them out of the heat and headed back out to retrace my steps yet again. Ten minutes of walking along calling out her name produced the desired result. Like the Shopkeeper, Trixie appeared. She must have been exhausted, poor yoke, because as soon as she got over beside me she flopped down in the shade of a clump of grass and pretty much fell asleep.

There may have been crying, but to protect Trixie's dignity I won't say who shed the tears.

Texted our rescue coordinator to say "found her!" She said, "great. Do you know anyone who could take some puppies that have been dumped in a box in Termonfeckin?"

Seratonin levels were high, plus I'd never been in charge of puppies before. I volunteered to take them. They were eight or ten weeks old, I was given to understand. It would be jolly.

Turns out, they're actually only about five or six weeks old, and strictly speaking too young to be away from their mammy. One of them is bold as brass, one is middling, and the runt is, well, a bit runty. He didn't eat anything at the vets. "Keep an eye on him," I was told. I worried immediately. I looked at them in their box on the kitchen floor. They cowered and trembled. Well, you would, wouldn't you?

A little while has passed now, all the adult dogs have solidly inspected the box of delights and proclaimed it less interesting than the boxes that come from Zooplus, the puppies are all fed, even Runty, and everyone's asleep. I've got a free hour before it's time to start walking and feeding all over again. The hospital visit will have to wait till another day.

Sorry the photos aren't better. The puppies won't come out of their clump. 

The adventures of Trixie down the rabbit hole

New dog Trixie has some typical terrier traits. She doesn't like cats much (which makes her a bit of a stressful presence round these parts in the evenings, when cats and dogs usually come together to flop around the living room and snooze) and she likes to dig A BIG HOLE.

Yesterday she found an existing big hole while we were having our usual mid-walk rest up on Wet Bum Point near the golf course. Off she went to dig around in this deep rabbit hole, and I left her to it. When I got up to leave about five minutes later though, I realised she was stuck in the hole. She seemed pretty firmly wedged, in fact. I wondered for a second whether I should try to pull her out, but her back legs can be a bit peculiar sometimes, and I didn't want to hurt her. Besides, she was digging away in the sand and would get herself free eventually. So I sat back down and waited. Read a bit of Moby Dick on my phone.

It took about ten minutes for her to wriggle her way out. She shook all the sand off herself and then triumphantly dived straight back down the hole.

In all I spent about half an hour trying to get her out of the rabbit hole. I might go a different route today.

Hotel for Dogs

It's been a busy week here at Waggy Towers.

First, Rollo went home. His real name is Sammy, and he lives on a small farm. Sadly his owner has gone into a nursing home, and the family are trying to make plans for his future, but while they do, he's a bit all over the place. Poor Sammy. As I was giving him back, I told them that we'd be able to find him a home if they needed us, but they want to sort something out themselves. They gave us a nice donation. Good for them.

Then, literally ten minutes later (that's actual literally there, not the new kind that means figuratively) I got a call from one of my dog-walking pals to say that one of his neighbours had just been told that her dog has to go. They live in the local mobile home park, and the little dog has been getting loose and causing a nuisance in the park, so the family was told that the warden would be called if something wasn't done.

So Trixie is here with us now. She is a feisty little terrier lady who, despite having spent most of her time outside in a little yard by herself in her former home, is happy to sit up on sofas and laps in our house. She loves her walks, she chases the cats a bit (but not in an alarming way) and she leaps right up at your face when you come downstairs in the morning. That's the good news.

The bad news is that she's a senior girl, at least eight years old, which means nobody will insure her. She also has just the one eye, which might put some people off. And she has the beginnings of a heart murmur, which could become expensive in the future.

But everyone does just think she's the cutest thing ever. And she really is. I should also point out that in an estate filled with bichon frises, cavaliers, and little poms, I'm proud to trot about with a slightly raggy, home-made looking dog on the end of my lead. We look a bit like a witch with her familar, though I'm not sure which of us is which.

New collie

Today I went and collected the new foster dog. He doesn't have a name. He was picked up with no collar on, and is friendly with people and other animals.

He's very much an outside dog, though. He keeps trying to cock his leg in the house and he walked into the patio doors not long after he arrived. But I've had him up to the vet and he seems fine. He can hear and see and walk, all of which is a good start.

Now we just have to hope someone is missing him and that they want him back. He's asleep in the kitchen at the moment.

Edited next day to add: I know dogs can be very clingy when they first come to a new house, but man, this is one laid-back, person-focused dog. He has had a sniff around the other dogs and cats, decided that they're fine, and left it at that. He just wants to lie at the feet of whoever's around. Me or mrmonkey, he's not bothered.

Yesterday he wouldn't eat his food, but today I put some baked bean juice on it and he larruped it. Now he's asleep again. Sometimes older dogs really are the business.

Ha ha, rasher feet

It turns out, right, that if you're planning on catching a ferry at 2am on a Saturday and following that up with a 6.5 hour drive across and down a good chunk of England, then the very best thing you can do on the Thursday night is to go out and see some comedy, then go drinking till three in the morning. It is also important that you get no nap on the Friday at all, so that your driving ozzyssey across England is filled with the kind of unfitness to drive that they make road safety ads about.

Nevertheless, this is what we did.

Last Thursday we went to see Dara Ó Briain in Vicar St during his current round of gigs there. It's quite a while since we last saw him here (can it possibly be this long ago? This seems too long ago. I must have just not blogged the last time, surely) on his own, but we did see him in December at the Console gig, so we hadn't completely forgotten the fast talking (mrmonkey's American colleague found it difficult to understand him every now and again), the manic hand gestures (in fact, his show has become more physical, and is all the better for it. He's got a gift for a bit of physical comedy), and the audience interaction, which is sometimes disastrous but actually worked really well last week. In the audience were not one, but two people who had saved the lives of others. There was also a woman who had gone through a period of having slightly predictive dreams that foretold entirely inconsequential events, but she hadn't had one since the mid 1990s.

One of the things I really enjoy about Dara's gigs is the fact that I can relax, knowing that he's not going to pull out a load of material about fat chicks or how women be shoppin'. He's not going to take the piss out of the old ball and chain, (indeed, most of the stories involving his missus are highly complimentary) or even shite on about football (even though he loves it). Of course, I'm in a privileged position here. If I was a homeopath wearing a badge saying "Let Us Drive Out Blasphemy As St. Patrick Drove Out The Snakes" I might feel differently. But even then, Dara has a way of arguing against the action rather than the person. He does have a section where he talks about old midwives' tales, but even then, he's very clear that it's only the "don't let the surgeons get you, with their knives" part he has a problem with, not the "hey, let's get you squared away and get a healthy baby out of you" part.

Maybe I should feel left out for not being a gamer, but even his section on computer games, which has the potential to be alienating to non-gamers, is put together in a way that includes everyone, because he creates a lovely fiction around first-person shooters that opens the routine up to anyone who's watched films.

So, to recap. If you are into blasphemy laws, you fear modern medicine and women, you don't watch films or play computer games, and you want to hear a lot about football, I recommend you go elsewhere for your comedy. For anyone else, I recommend you get a hold of some tickets to see Dara if you can.

The Ozzysey

At the very beginning of the year, some people in England who know ComedyB because they have a comedy family member of their own contacted me because they'd seen Ozzie's windy day picture online. They wanted to give her a home.

They filled out the adoption form for our rescue and everyone agreed they seemed like a great home. If only they weren't in England, said everyone. We don't rehome directly to homes in England, said the rescue committee. If it doesn't work out, we have no way of getting the dog back. The people were very disappointed. I was very disappointed. Ozzie continued about her life, totally unaffected by all the fuss.

When she came to us in August last year, Ozzie was very ill, you see. Her condition turned out to be pancreatic insufficiency, not uncommon in dogs at all. It means her pancreas doesn't make the enzymes she needs to digest her food, so her food just passes through her, irritating her insides as it goes. Untreated, the condition eventually leads animals to starve to death. Luckily, it's very easy to treat. You just sprinkle enzyme powder on her food at mealtimes, feed her a high quality food, and leave it at that. In the months that we had her, she went from being 17kg down to 14.5kg at her lightest, and back up to 18.65kg again. She went from being a bag of bones who only just trundled along behind you when you walked to being a sleek, black powerhouse of energy with a high-gloss coat who never left a bird unchased, a dog ungreeted, a thing on the floor unchewed, or a lap empty.

Despite the fact that her condition is easy to treat, though, nobody wanted her. A few forms came in asking about her, because she was said to be good with both kids and cats, as well as other dogs. But every time we mentioned her condition, the enquiries stopped.

Still the family in England asked about her, admired her photos, and chatted back and forth with us about her. They didn't care that she had a condition, or that she would be expensive to feed, or that it would be expensive to get her to them. They just wanted her. We sent emails back and forth. They promised they would send her back if it didn't work out. They swore they would take care of her.

So last weekend, we brought her. Mrmonkey and I took her on the ferry to Holyhead and drove her down to where the family lives. We were prepared for the people to really take to her immediately, because she's that kind of dog. But even their number one dog, a three-year-old labrador called Maddy, wanted to be her pal instantly. She ran all around the house with her, licking her face jumping on her, and bringing her toys for Ozzie to play with.

Ozzie knew something was going on. She had been separated from our other dogs, shut into the car inside a scary loud box for some hours, driven for ages on a very long road by two very, very tired people, and finally had her bed and blankets left in someone else's kitchen for her. She was a bit clingy and she wasn't sure about this new dog.

Even still, despite some tears from me on parting from her, she only sat by the front foor for a short while after we left her behind with her new family. She then did the classic first-day-of-school maneuver and just bloody got on with it. Sat on laps, played with Maddy, ate the cheese she was offered, went for walks, and settled down to sleep.

So she will be very happy. A wee dog who was dumped in a box a year ago, and now she's in a perfect home with people who just love her.

Bye bye Ozzie. Happy life.

Two new dogs coming tomorrow.

Bobbykins

Here he is.

Bobby was surrendered to the rescue just before Christmas, his lovely home with his nice Eastern European owner pulled out from under him because of the recession. His owner had to go home and couldn't afford to take the dog with him. So Bobby went to a local foster, where he's been for the last two months.

We've been minding him over the weekend while his regular fosters are away. He's a complete sweetheart. Loves cuddles, comes when you call him, falls over a lot in a cute puppy way, and is happy to be around other dogs and around cats. Today a nice family from Mullingar came to view him. They loved him straight away. He just sat there and let all three kids hug and cuddle him at once, and actually seemed to enjoy it instead of just tolerating it. The family has been home-checked and found suitable, so Bobby will be going there at the end of the month.

Ozzie's due to leave us at the end of this week, and it'll be back to three dogs again. The sofa will seem so empty.

Battle of wills in Tesco

Last night I was picking up a few necessities in Tesco when I ran into the woman from this blog post. Remember her?

Well, we looked each other up and down very quickly, and of course had a judgemental look over each other's baskets to see what the other one was buying. I had milk and juice and toothpaste and eggs in mine: normal stuff. My arch nemesis, on the other hand, was clutching an enormous box of Thornton's chocolates, which she pressed more tightly to her as I passed.

From the way she looked at me, she knew that I knew that she was planning to scoff the entire box herself.

And so I win round two.

Jimmy Kimmel laying into Jay Leno

Now this is a presenter thinking on his feet. I can't believe Leno couldn't come up with a single riposte to any of Kimmel's remarks here.

I don't like that thing you like

British people seem to have gone a bit mad lately about television, especially the BBC, and what should or shouldn't be on it. People don't want to have to pay the salaries of Jonathan Ross or Frankie Boyle. They don't want subscription channels to get their precious sporting events. Even the comedian and New Statesman columnist Mark Watson, himself on the receiving end of "we shouldn't have to pay for this" complaints about his BBC 4 show We Need Answers, and a great fan of programming related to football (which I personally would rather nobody wanted to watch), would prefer it if there were fewer dance-related shows on the television and has (in jest, of course) asked for the number to be reduced.

I can't help thinking that everyone needs to calm down and stop wanting the stuff they don't like to be taken off the telly. Your telly is fine, believe me. You have no idea what it's like out there in other countries where they don't have the BBC. You really don't. Complaining about having to pay the license fee to pay the salaries of entertainers you don't like is a little like complaining about having to pay tax for a health service when you never get sick, or a school system when you don't have any children.

But it's easy for me to say, I don't pay for the BBC. Except I do, because I buy DVDs and I pay a Sky+ subscription which funds all those second-run channels that the BBC sells its shows into after they've run on the main channels. So I'm a customer as well. And I like dancing. And Jonathan Ross. Sometimes.

And, to add insult to injury, I, through my license fee, am required to pay the salary of this monstrosity. So you have nothing to moan about.

Roll on February

Okay, the first two weeks look like being a bit crap. Mrmonkey will be away, visiting the mothership and renewing his acquaintance with the endless ad breaks of U.S. television, and I will be here on my own.

But then will come the first gigs of spring, peeping out of the calendar like bright crocuses and acting like beacons to steer me through the rocky weeks of the mister's absence.

On February 14th we will be going to Vicar St. to see Midlake, one of our two favourite bands of the last ten years (yes, the Arcade Fire is the other one). To demonstrate how hotly I'm anticipating it, let me tell you that I am actually hoping they play tracks off their forthcoming album, because I could do with some new Midlake about the place.

Then, a mere four days later, we'll be going back to Vicar St. to see Dara Ó Briain. His gigs are a treat for people who (like me) love their comedy but get a bit fed up of the usual stand-up topics--women, eh? fat people, eh? chavs, eh? airlines, eh? Big Brother, eh?--and would like something just a little bit different and, yes, perhaps just a little bit nerdier. Reading the interview with Dara from yesterday's Irish Times (although the interview is a bit peculiarly written) whets the appetite, as does reminding myself of previous times we saw him in Vicar St.

All we need now is for the snow and ice to EFF OFF back up to the Arctic, and we can get on with getting through January and watching the crocuses come out.

Bored Slippy

Minister for Education Batt O'Keeffe (yes, that is his name) has decreed that our schools will remain closed until next Thursday. This is partly because of burst pipes, knackered heating systems, and the fact that many of our schools are in prefabs, which you couldn't possibly expect salaried members of the teachers' union, sorry, the precious children to use in this weather. Also, nobody can get to school because the roads and paths are all too slidey. Buses can't run, and nobody can walk anywhere without being afraid that they're going to fall over.

In a not unrelated development, the senior civil servant who has been appointed as our Bad Weather Czar (whose name I currently cannot find on Google) was on the radio this morning defending the fact that the Republic of Ireland's National Roads Authority buys the same amount of grit every year as does Northern Ireland's roads authority, despite the fact that NI has a quarter the road mileage that we have. He said that the government's priority was to ensure that "primary national routes" were kept clear.

Well that's all well and good for the people who live on "primary national routes" (which is almost nobody, except the elves who live in IKEA), but what about the rest of us mugs who live in glass-road housing estates and at the ends of little boreens halfway up hills? We can all just go and shite, can we?

Everyone's bored with this now. The weather isn't even all that bad. It's just that even a tiny fall of snow can break a crappy infrastructure.

And everywhere is sold out of Yaktrax. This winter is stupid. Roll on spring. When I will be going to London and Stockholm, assuming the ice age hasn't begun. If it has, I'm going to Rio.

Easterly

It's very windy out and about here today. In this photo, Ozzie is not shaking or moving her head at all. That's the wind, that is.

Looks like the weather will turn icy again tomorrow, so it's time to order my Yak Trax so that at least the dogs don't pull me off my feet when we're walking.

Did you have a lovely Christmas? I did. I seem to have cornered the market in Burt's Bees lip salve, though, so if anyone needs any, do let me know. No exaggeration, I think I have ten sticks of it. I did also get a pile of Lush stuff from youngest Byrne, which included a fantastically bracing salt and vodka facial scrub. Almost as good as a long walk on a very windy day by the sea.

Oh, did you have best-laid plans, did you?

Well, now they have changed.

To get the new year off to a rollicking start (all the extra two seconds of it, or whatever it was we actually got today), Lulu gashed the pad of her paw on a piece of glass or something on the beach. Not the part of her paw she actually walks on, more the ankle bit. But she sliced that pad pretty good. So off to the vet on the frozen road we went, where she got sedated and stitched and bandaged.

She's fine, but she has to have two kinds of medication for several days, and the medication might make her sick. And she has to come in on Christmas Eve to have her dressing changed and a new bandage put on. So it means she won't be going to kennels with the others tomorrow. I feel bad for poor Ozzie that her very best playmate won't be around to do kennels with her over the next week, but in another way I feel like Lulu's time has come. After all, she did have to spend two weeks in kennels, alone, when we went to Derbyshire in June. Now she gets to hang out at the parents' house with us in comfort over Christmas Day and Stephenses Day while the others are all in kennels, freezing their asses off.

In other news, two of my photos were chosen for the vets' calendar this year. And Blakey is the only cat on the calendar.

SUCK IT, OTHER PET OWNERS.

Happy new year

Today is the winter solstice. Which means that tomorrow is the new year, astronomically speaking. And astronomically speaking is good enough for me.

While out walking the dogs today--I saw the sun come up at about 8.45 and was out again when it got dark at about 16.30--I had that feeling you get when you are at the very bottom, or the very middle, of a very long tunnel. You feel stifled, and then you feel that lift as the carriage or the car starts to move out of the tunnel and you find yourself leaning forwards in the hope it'll get you out faster.

Not that I'm particularly going anywhere. Next year might just be the same as this one. For me, that's pretty much okay. (Your experience might be different, in which case I wish radical change for you.) Although I do wish I could have stayed in abstracting. I miss spending my work days finding out what was going on in the world.

Anyway, when I get up on the dunes with the dogs tomorrow morning, there will be that delicious, childish, primeval holding of my breath while I discover whether the sun is going to struggle up over the horizon or not. I don't know what we'll do if it doesn't. Go back to bed and wait to see what happens next, I suppose.

Good thing Mrmonkey isn't going to work tomorrow. We can wait and see together.

Is nice system, but please, where is heat?

We recently spent over €4,000 on a new heating system for our house. It's a very clever system that adjusts itself in line with the temperature outside and can be set to heat just your water or just your radiators and no water, whichever you prefer. However, it turns out that you can't just turn it ON when it's cold out. You have to fiddle with the settings to reprogramme its start and stop times. There's no "boost" setting that turns the heat on for an hour and then turns it off again.

There is NO BLOODY ON button that just turns the effing heat ON.

So stupid. See, that's what happens when you don't ask anyone for feedback before you start production on something.

Let's focus group this mother out

As I believe they say in the publishing trade.

I've decided to actually try to produce a workable second draft of my book. If you read any of it, I would like you to tell me what you thought of it, if that's not too much trouble. One thing you did like and one thing you didn't like will be sufficient. Also, if you didn't finish it, when did you stop reading and why? And if you did finish it, did you like it all the way to the end or did you think it got rubbish somewhere along the way but you finished it anyway because you're bloody minded like that?

I've already decided on some of the broader changes I'm going to make and some of the character relationships I'm going to rework (mainly the two lead characters, who I like better as semi-robotic loners who've found their niche in life as zombie killers than as nice, regular people who fall in love with other people ever), but it would be nice not to make the same mistakes twice.

So, if you can be bothered, please comment. I realise there's nothing in it for you except that book-group feeling, but you would be helping me with my project. Thanks.

The End of Innistown

So, Google Docs doesn't allow me to upload the whole novel in one go. Stupid, huh?

Here is a link to the first part of the novel.

And here is a link to the second part of the novel.

I don't know if this will work. If it doesn't work, I am sorry.

Usual Disclaimer: Please remember that this is a first draft that was written in 30 days.

Personally I think it lacks the charm of my previous nanowrimo novel, which I greatly enjoyed writing and still think of very fondly. But it's done now and that's zombies officially laid to rest. So to speak.

Accentmonkey, just how sad are you?

Here's how sad I am. I finally found a website where I can buy a proper deck-scrub broom, so I can wash my kitchen floor properly instead of just sweeping and mopping it.

And I am excited about this, because I have been looking for one for months.

And that is the story of how sad I am.

I won!

Look, I did NanoWriMo and I won!

I don't like this year's novel as much as I like the one I wrote a few years ago, but it was still fun to do it.

In April I'm going to do Script Frenzy. I am resolved.

So now I have some extra time on my hands. I really should do something useful with it. Yes. Something useful. I will get right on that, Taoiseach. I certainly won't, for example, spend my time propping up the bar in my local pub shiteing on about football and getting free tickets for stuff. No, because that would be wasting my time. Wasting it. See?

Best laid plans, eh?

I had big plans tonight. Oh yes. I was going to go into Dublin and meet people in the pub, something I haven't done for months. Honestly, months. My own animals are all packed off to kennels, I am going to Glasgow tomorrow, and I have a full day's work ahead of me.

Then I got a text about an older dog someone found in our estate. The woman who found it picked it up off the road outside the estate yesterday, and she can't keep it because it cries a lot and doesn't sleep. It's kind of deaf, and it's kind of partially sighted, and it can't walk properly because its back legs are wonky.

So I was asked would I take it for a while, and I said I could keep it until tomorrow. So he's here now. He has a fitful wander around every now and then, and he's obviously extremely confused about where he is, and probably a bit distressed about this change in his situation, but he's quiet enough. He really likes to be in physical contact with a person, though. He had a nice nap with me on the sofa earlier, stretched out beside me. So now I won't be going out, and I've to go to the vet later and see how he is and what we can do with him. He'll need to go to a reasonably quiet foster home for about a week, where there's someone at home at all day to mind him.

It would be great if he had just wandered from somewhere and we found his owner. It would be just great. I'm not holding out a lot of hope, though.

UPDATE!

Owners found!

His name is Max and he is 18. He lives in the village, and usually when he goes out the back for a pee, they attach him to a line so he can't wander off (he has had four strokes). But the line wasn't securely attached this time and he wandered off. He was only wandering for a few minutes when he was picked up, though. Poor old guy. Still, at least they'll be more careful in future.

Jane the cat

After only a year of living with us, Jane died. She was sick for a long time. Months, really. It turned out that she was FIV+ and possibly had been for ever? Who knows. Estimates about the prevalance of FIV in outdoor and feral cats vary wildly, and there's every chance that she picked it up during the years she basically lived as an outside cat.

In any case, I now have to decide whether or not to get my other cats tested for FIV. On the one hand, it's expensive to get them tested, and at least two of my cats really, really hate going to the vet or being put in their boxes or anything like that. On the other hand, if we have it in the house we need to know. We can't, in good conscience, take any more cats in to live here if we have FIV in the house. FIV in itself is not that contagious if there's no fighting or sexing or open wounds around the place, so the cat most at risk of catching it is Linus, because he goes outside, and that's the only place where fighting might happen.

I don't want to have to stop Linus from going outside. The whinging alone would be too much to bear.

Although I miss Jane, I don't miss how ill she was in recent months, and the constant visits to the vet, the upset of her being ill all the time, and the cleaning up after her. And Blakey does fill that sitting-on-me-even-when-it's-not-really-convenient-to-have-a-cat-sit-on-me niche that Jane used to occupy so well. Blakey has even taken it a stage further and will crawl up the sleeve of the Slanket and attack my armpits while I'm trying to type.

So cute. So inconvenient.

Poor Jane. I'm sorry there wasn't anything we could do, and I'm sorry we didn't know that sooner, or there might have been more chicken and less grumping at you in your end times.

Psst, want a pedigree cat?

Despite my five cats, I think of myself as primarily a dog person. This is because I think of myself as being largely sloppy, sprawly, mucky, and willing to eat just about anything if it's served in a bowl and someone makes yum yum noises while they pass it over.

However, the nice lady in Laois from whom we adopted Lorelai aka Rory aka Smidger Fee aka The Smidge contacted me yesterday to say that she has a posh breed cat who is looking for a nice indoor home, and she thought of me. I was simultaneously aghast at the idea of me as some kind of crazy cat collector person who fawns over her beautiful long-haired tortoiseshell kitty and would love to have a house full of long-haired tortoiseshell kitties, and highly flattered that when a valuable cat comes into someone's possession, they think of me as an ideal home for it.

(She probably would not think this if she heard me telling Jane last night that she better make her mind up to get well or die soon, because I'm not spending any more money bringing her to the vet or any more time and energy cleaning up her puke off the floor every time she eats.)

Anyway, six cats is a bridge too far, so I reluctantly turned down her Norwegian forest cat, but said I would keep an eye out for a good home. So if you have a good indoor home to offer a really beautiful cat, let me know and I'll pass your details along. If I think you're good enough.

By the way, the cat in the picture is just some random Norwegian forest cat, just so you can get an idea of what they look like. It's not the one on offer.

(Obviously I will continue to look after Jane. Come on, like.)

And we're off

Day one and I've got over 2,000 words written. Maybe I'll make it this year. First couple of pages are a bit boring though, so I might not bother posting them. If I write something exciting I'll post it.

What? What? You did what?

I mean, what the FUCK? WHAT?

What the fuck is wrong with people?

Um, that is all.

More Blakey cuteness

Oh, and did I mention that Blakey thinks that Lulu is her mother? Well, she does. Lulu has to bat her away when she tries to suckle, but she is happy enough to let her curl up beside her and sleep.

We went on holidays

To Markree Castle in Sligo.

The plan was originally to go to Cuba, but that turned out to be very expensive and a massive hassle, so we decided to have a cheapish reading week in Ireland, which wouldn't involve flights or luggage allowance or any of that crap. Markree, as a bonus, let us bring the dogs, so we didn't even need to worry about that. Just chuck everyone in the car and off we go.

From that point of view, the place was a dream. The dogs were very welcome, and the room was big enough for all six of us to bunk up together, spread over two beds. There was plenty of space to run them across the (as advertised) rolling parklands and formal gardens. Nobody disturbed us, and we didn't disturb anyone else. We took them out for a long run in the mornings, then spent the afternoons sitting around reading while the dogs slept. Then another run in the evening before dinner, and another short walk in the moonlight before bedtime. Top notch. And we saw a stag one of the days. It was all very Regency.

There were a couple of problems with the room. The shower was awful. Truly awful. With the shower head on, you were standing under a dribble of hot water. Taking it off produced a slightly more satisfying trickle, so we did that instead. Also the bed was broken on one side. Separately, the food was kind of strange, as if the proper chef was away and had been replaced by someone who had never cooked a vegetable before in their lives.

We still really enjoyed it, and looking at other people's photographs of the place on Flickr indicates that the food isn't always like that, so I would recommend it to someone else. Plus I read two novels while I was there, which was something of a result, because I can't remember when I last finished a book.

It has been an awfully long time

Things have been busy here on Waltons' Mountain. Life news in brief:

*Ozzie is doing better, thanks. She has stopped losing weight and actually might be putting it on a little. This is great news, because it means we've found the problem and it is treatable, which means that when she has her weight up to normal, we can start looking for a home for her.

*We have a new kitten. She is called Blakey. She is called this because she has kind of a Hitler moustache effect going on, but you can't really call a kitten Hitler, can you? (No, is the answer. The answer is no.) Blakey came to us from Roscrea, where we were attending the funeral of our friend's mother. At the reception afterwards, some people rescued her from a tree, but then she was just left there in the carpark, only a five-barred gate between her and the main Dublin road. So we took her away, leaving our details with the hotel staff in case anyone came looking for her (although given the worm load she was carrying, and the state of her ears, and how hungry she was, it seems unlikely that she strayed from a loving home). We are officially looking for a home for her, but there are kittens everywhere, it seems, and nobody appears to be interested. So that's five cats we have now.

*Jane has been ill, but she appears to be doing better now.

All in all, there have been a lot of trips to the vet, which has been expensive and time-consuming, and reached a nadir when I had to give Jane a suppository. Hopefully we're on a bit of an upswing now, because I can't manage much more animal hassle.

A poorly girl

We have a new canine house guest at the moment. Her name is Ozzie. She was originally picked up by our rescue at about ten weeks old, abandoned in a box in Drogheda, covered in fleas and totally underfed. She has been fostered by a single family since then, and did actually go to a new home after she was spayed a couple of months ago, but it didn't work out (the property just wasn't secure enough for her questing nature) and she came back into foster.

We took her when her foster family went on holidays a few weeks ago, and she's been fine in our house so we agreed to keep her a bit longer while they all got organized with getting back from holidays and getting back to school and so on.

She's a sweet girl and she fits in here extremely well. Apart from chasing Linus a bit (which all the dogs do, because he's so chasable), and the odd bit of power-supply chewing, she fits in here pretty well. She has many of the appealing traits of a labrador (likes to rest her heavy head on your lap and sigh, likes to go for a big long walk, loves a cuddle) without the insane food fixation we have seen in labradors gone by, and in a smaller, easier-to-handle package.

Unfortunately she's not well now. She's losing weight, not digesting her food properly, and having accidents in the kitchen at night. Today we went out for a walk and she didn't even chase the seagulls, which is a sure sign something is amiss. So we went to the vet, who gave her an injection, special food, several types of tablet, and some stuff that looks like Maalox that needs to be syringed into her three times a day, an hour before she eats.

She's down from 17.5kg when she came to us three weeks ago (and that was about 1kg underweight) to 15.65kg this morning. When she lies on her side you can see her heart beating under her ribs, and you can see all the knobs on her spine.

I hope she gets better soon. Looks like we might have her for a while yet. As I write this I am sitting on the sofa with her head jammed under my arm. I will be working like this for the rest of the day because I am soppy.

A family man

This is a bad day

Everything's dark. Gloomy. It's the lousy tail end of a piss-poor summer in the weather arena.

We had to cancel a weekend away in England in July, and we've had to cancel our trip to Cuba in November. We've had minor dog complications. I've been eating crap and getting far less exercise than I should.

To top it all off, I've moved to a new position in our company, which takes me away from the world of periodicals and back into the world of writing marketing copy. On the face of it, that's fine, except when I can't think of anything to write and I sit here and stare at the screen just getting tireder and tireder.

And I have barely scraped fifty pages of reading the whole summer long. I seem to just sort of sit here. I'm going to the doctor tomorrow for more blood tests, just to see what's happening with the good old thyroid function.

On the other hand, we have found a new number 2 for the laminated list, so that's something at least.

We take our wins where we can.

Hot SCD Gossip

So it is official. Arlene Phillips is being dropped from Strictly Come Dancing in favour of Aleisha Dixon. This raises several problems for me as a telly consumer, a woman, and a fan of SCD.

Ever since Aleisha Dixon started to do well on the show, even before she won, the BBC began pushing her, grooming her for something more. A core of telly types appear to think she is the British Beyonce. Bruce said it on many occasions, and I bet you anything he wasn't saying it off his own bat; he's a team player, is Bruce.

She got a new recording contract, her single was single of the week on BBC Radio, and presenters had to say they liked it, despite the fact that it sounded exactly like "Mambo No. 5," which nobody likes, not even the people who bought a copy. I'm not sure any of it really did any good, because I don't follow the charts, but it does seem to me that as soon as the song stopped being single of the week in its first week of release, I rarely heard it again. Contrast this with Lily Allen, who is on the radio every second of the day, seemingly.

And now the BBC is replacing Arlene Phillips with Aleisha Dixon on SCD. Why replace Arlene? Because, even on a dance show that is primarily watched by women, only one of the four judges can be a woman. And it's convenient to replace Arlene, because she's older and a bit grumpy. Of course, Len Goodman and Bruce Forsyth are also older and a bit grumpy, but you can't take all the older people off the show, because a lot of the show's audience is made up of older people.

So off Arlene goes. What the hell does she know about dance anyway? With her years of choreography experience and dance coaching to the stars behind her, what the hell makes her such an expert? No no, much better to get someone new and fluffy in who will be nice and who doesn't really know anything about dance.

If they're going to replace anyone on the show with Aleisha Dixon, why can't it be Tess Daly? If the producers want to groom Aleisha for anything, why not groom her to take over from Bruce when he eventually dessicates under the strain of trying to pretend that the Sunday night dance-off isn't recorded on Saturday? She's peppy and personable and can sing and dance, and according to the BBC, everyone loves her. So why not take the big chance instead of the easy option of booting the old boot?

Would you like to hear a story about dogs that starts off sad and gets happy?

You would? Okay.

Early in 2009, I got a call from Drogheda Animal Rescue (the organization I sometimes volunteer for) asking me if I would help out with fostering two little old Jack Russell ladies. Lucky, 14, and Princess, 17, had been brought by their owner to the vet to be put to sleep because the owner had got a new cocker spaniel and the Jack Russells, who lived exclusively in the back garden, didn't like it. There was nothing else wrong with these dogs, as far as we knew.

So the vet called DAR, and the dogs were put into a foster home near me. I used to go round most days at lunchtime and take them out for a walk. They were always excited to see me, always happy to go for their walk, and I always hated leaving them, because, to be honest, I didn't really think they were getting proper care there either. Lucky turned out to have a heart condition and was put on pills. She eventually had a seizure and the dogs had to be moved from that foster home to somewhere where they could be more closely monitored. I was sad to see them go, assuming I would never see them again. Yes, I did have a little cry.

Fortunately, a lovely couple turned up close to Drogheda who took these two ladies in and turned them into part-time outside dogs, part-time sofa dogs.

Unfortunately, Lucky died a while later, and Princess was left on her own.

Can you see where this is going?

Yes, on Wednesday I delivered our wee foster (who we were originally calling Little, but whose name was later changed to Bijou) round to the house of these nice people, to see if she would make a good companion for Princess.

Their house is so lovely! There are lovely dog beds in the kitchen, and lovely kennels outside! And the dogs get to sit on the sofa in the evening! And the lady goes to the beach in the evenings for walks, so Bijou will be able to go for walks! And Princess did not hate her, so maybe she will eventually like her!

The best thing is that Princess looks amazing. She's lost loads of weight and she's had some baths, and she is lively and happy and waggy in her tail. She's bright-eyed and happy to receive visitors. These people have done a great job.

I hope Bijou will be happy there.

But we do miss her very much. And yes, I had a little cry.

Dog fostering is hard, as I believe I may have pointed out before.

More setbacks for pedigree dogs

Some time ago, a documentary maker called Jemima Harrison made a show called Pedigree Dogs Exposed, which basically scared the bejesus out of everyone who cares about dogs, because it pointed out how eugenics in the dog-breeding business have turned some of your favourite breeds into barely functional freaks that suffer from every health problem you can possibly imagine.

As a direct result of Jemima's work and the support she received from animal welfare groups, the BBC chose to stop showing Crufts, the world's biggest advertisement for this type of dog breeding.

But now More 4 have decided that they will start showing it instead. Bad news for dogs.

Little the dog

Last night some of the local kids (yes, the ones I'm always complaining about) brought a little dog to our door. They were accompanied by a parent this time, the first time I've ever met one of their parents.

They had found a little female jack russell wandering around the estate and she seemed lost and tired. Crucially, the kids didn't recognize her, and they know every dog in the neighbourhood. So Mammy had agreed that they could go around all the houses where they knew people with dogs lived and ask them if they knew the dog. But first they wanted to check with me that I would take her if they couldn't find anywhere for her to go by bedtime.

Nobody owned her, so now she's here. She's a sweet wee girl, and clearly very much a lap dog. She likes to be picked up and likes to sit next to people. We are very hopeful that someone in the estate owns her, or at least someone local. But if not, well, someone's going to get a lovely little dog soon.

I am calling her Little, for now. Because, you know, she's little.

MJ's will has been filed

According to the BBC:

"As we work to carry out Michael's instructions to safeguard both the future of his children as well as the remarkable legacy he left us as an artist, we ask that all matters involving his estate be handled with the dignity and the respect that Michael and his family deserve."

So, none at all then.