To sit with a dog on a hillside

Monday 10 May 2010

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.

15 comments:

  1. LA PERLA!!! Oh goody an aspirational blog for me and my Matalan pants....I shall follow you obediently.

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  2. Lou - lovely to meet you. Yep, and with poking-out wires and fraying bows now. Does it make me hijusly shallow that I actually cried??

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  3. Sorry to hear about your bra troubles, but thank God you are back from your 'holiday' - it hasn't been the same without you! And you've thrown in a reference to Kizzy, too (I bought the book after watching the series - the bit where she got into a fight haunted me. I was a very fight-averse little girl).

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  4. Unlike me, who liked nowt more than a scrap with a gang of big lads. Did she fight with Pru? She haunted me - her and her scary mother...

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  5. You should explain 'skip' to the Yanks. Back in the 80s when it was impossible to find a public toilet in NYC I would jump into a skip to relieve myself. Can't help but feel a nostalgia for my 20s whenever I see one today.

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  6. Dear Yanks,

    A skip is a big metal container we hire to chuck crap into which someone else then takes away and deals with.

    If you are lucky, poor people come every night and steal all your crap out of it, thus giving you cosmic brownie points and more importantly quadrupling the volume of crap you can chuck away.

    In the eighties, the crap was such gems as Victorian radiators and floorboards.

    You may also, it would appear, find the odd 20-year-old Yank peeing in your skip, in which case I would set the dog on him.

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  7. The times when a skip is hunkered down on my driveway are some of the mostly gloriously freeing of my life. "You mean I could just, just, chuck this into the skip and be done with it?" Can't you plead the environment and have some lovely protesters come by and carry your fridge off like a carbon-producing totem?

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  8. A blog post with Kizzy, skips and La Perla undies is rather bizarre yet surprisingly it resonates with me.
    We avoid all these kinds of pet mis-haps by only keeping a goldfish.

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  9. Only you could deal with skips and chewing dogs and with enough humour to mention La Perla and the s... word in the same sentence! Bravo, ELS. You are such a joy to read (and reread). So glad you are back and at'em. Merci.

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  10. LPC - utter bliss, innit? Lovely idea to enlist the hairy placard-wavers and, JADH, will save much use of the s, f, c and assorted other words as the Colonel staggers about trying to shove them into the back of my jeep.

    Trish - lovely new pic - how are the theatricals going??

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  11. I see in your profile pic you're still a dog. Does it resemble you in any way??
    Theatricals going well - only a week to go and I've recorded a ridiculous message today for Elaine Paige's Radio 2 show: so listen out on Sunday for me talking like a Texan hooker.

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  12. "...piss-smelling flops of brown swirly carpet..."

    damn

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  13. Trish - only you could get away with that comment. Yup, am still a dog. And I LOVE that programme, will be listening..

    ADG - what, in a good way..?

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  14. like a pikey! hahahaha! you should explain that one, too!

    my housemate and i used to go skip-diving in cardiff and we got the most fabulous stained glass windows from an old victorian house. shocking that someone had pitched them out.

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Please leave a comment if you can be remotely bothered - anything you have to say is valuable and I absolutely love hearing from you all. Elizabeth