To sit with a dog on a hillside

I've had a skip parked in the drive for the past two weeks. No, thanks for asking, I haven't been trapped under it. Nor has the Colonel buried me in it. Nor have I thrown myself from the attic window, half-pike-tuck-and-twist to land perfectly in the rotting cardboard, ancient ladders, heartbreaking outgrown and loved-to-bits-toys and piss-smelling flops of brown swirly carpet. The man who came to get it said with evident delight 'you clearly never read the agreement, Modom. Them fridges will have to come out, I can't take them.' So the skip has gone but two fridges and a freezer stand in a pikey way on the drive and are more annoying than the fact he claimed 'Health & Safety' as his reason for leaving them rather than the truth. Which was clearly: let's see if we can make a grown woman cry when she gets home from work.

Anyway, apart from looking like Kizzy's gaff from the outside, great strides are being made indoors Sorting Things Out. The Colonel, between assignments, has turned his gimlet eye to domestic matters. There is now a regimental order to pretty much everything, from wooden spoons to lingerie. The bots and I are road-testing the sytem to destruction: 'where are my blue shin-pads?' 'the notebook I wrote the Twighlight pre-quel in?' 'my wits/patience/sense of humour?' He is doing a great job; however, this is the payback:

He thinks the dog should be out of her cage and sleeping in her basket on the upstairs landing. I am nervous that she will abuse this freedom and double her opportunity to find something wildly expensive (feather curtain tie-backs, silk bed throw, anything with a La Perla label) and chew the shit out of it while we are all asleep.

The bots are, understandably, enormously pro this plan. Of course, she never eats football boots or M&S pants and they know that she will sneak silently onto their beds in the dead of night and curl up with a bone-breaking sigh in the crook of their knees, slither a silky head under their chins and breathe sweetly and heavily in their ears and they will all pretend she had JUST arrived when I thump in to wake them and grumble about hairy beds and muddy paws.

I think I need to learn to pick my battles.