You're all alone

Ned's gone up to the Lakes for a few days with his chums and I'm here holding the fort. It's awfully quiet. I've tidied and cleaned and dusted and gardened a bit (but there's a cold wind blowing so I've come in) and now I'm at a loose end. I think I'll go and find a sunny spot somewhere and read a book.

I bet Ned won't be sticking to cardboard-and-water while he's away so neither shall I, especially as I'm not the one trying to lose weight! I think I'll indulge in egg and chips for supper tonight. Mmmmmmm, chips ......

This song has no title

I fairly often do experimental cookery, depending on what's available in Mother Hubbard's cupboards. Usually the results are okay, sometimes they're quite dramatic failures. Last night's bash was so splendidly successful I've actually written down the recipe. I just don't know what to call it. It has a sort-of Chinesey flavour - any suggestions?

4 pork chops/steaks
1 onion
Garlic
1 tin chopped tomatoes
3-4 tbsp hoi-sin sauce

Chop onions and garlic and soften for a few minutes in a little oil. Add the pork and lightly seal meat, then remove meat. Add tomatoes and hoi-sin sauce and heat through. Put half the sauce into an ovenproof dish, place the meat on top and pour on the rest of the sauce.

Cover and cook at 180°C (350°, gas mark 4) for 1 hour.

Serve with rice, or noodles, or boiled potatoes, all with steamed vegetables.

Serves 4.

Now and then just like before

Twelve noon came and I left work. The electricity man hadn't been. No surprise there then.

Can you hear me?

Sometimes I wonder why I bother. On a forum someone's posted in a panic that her dog's brushed against some wet masonry paint, what should she do? I ascertained that it was water-based and told her to wash it off before it dries. Too late, it's already dry. Basically the only option is to wait until that hair moults out in a few weeks. Cue weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Then comes the next post - her other dog has just come in, and she too has paint on her, and it's still wet. "Ho hum" she says "It looks like I'll be bathing both of them tomorrow". I've just pointed out that if she baths them tonight, before the paint dries hard, it'll come off much more easily.

Can you hear me, Mother?

A very merry unbirthday to me

I got back from walking the dogs and on the doorstep was a package. A bomb? No, it was from Jane across the Pond, responding to my plea regarding Merkin cups, and contained a very fine set of US cup and spoon measures, in a lovely sunny-Californ-eye-ay colour. The timing was perfect because Piglet had just run out of his biscuits and I was going to have a bash at another batch. This time I could get the quantities correct! As I went through the recipe measuring out the various flours and meals I also weighed them. I was pleased to find that I'd guessed quite accurately with some, but there were some that were definitely out. I hadn't suspected that half a cup of soy flour is only fractionally heavier than a quarter cup of cornmeal. The resulting dough needed a lot more milk than the previous batch to make it hold together when I rolled it out.

Very many thanks, Jane, from both me and Piglet!

Something in the way she moves ...

... or fails to.

Don't you just hate it when someone picks up your Travel Bug, promptly stops geocaching and fails to respond to emails? Come on Zobags, pull your finger out!

Oh it all makes work for the working man to do

You remember how I stressed on the phone that the electricity meter could only be changed between 9am and 12 noon? According to the card through the door the electrician called at 12.45. When it was confirmed that the times we gave were on the jobsheet m'colleague gave them a rocket . They're trying again next Tuesday, and now we've limited them to between 10 and 12. Can you guess who's drawn the short straw for that shift? Watch this space.

Whatcha got cookin'?

Recipe for a Jolly Fine Weekend:
Good food, good beer, good wine, good company, good conversation. Marvellous.

Mallers and Maddy came up to stay, bearing a fantastically thoughtful and gorgeous gift, for a weekend of detox on the cardboard-and-water diet and to set the world to rights. In brief, ‘king Omally chased a sheep and later annexed an unsuspecting state to add to his realm; Croc shoes are both hideous and uncomfortable; Kouros decided not to dangle by his midriff from a crane; medium tee-shirts can double up as casual frocks; organic gardens ("I remember when all this was fields") are best seen when a) plants are growing and b) there isn’t horizontal hail; and board games are now off the agenda. If anyone mentions “just one point” there’ll be trouble.

Back to work tomorrow. Ho hum.

A big question mark

A few weeks ago Ned's rather unloved - because it was a replacement for his adored surprise birthday present one that got stolen - chainsaw seized and nearly broke his shoulder when he tried to start it. "Pah, rubbish chainsaw, I never liked it" was his attitude, and he searched the net and eventually splashed out and bought a Quality one which he likes much better. And it starts too.

Then the other day, whilst searching for some Very Important Papers that had been put in a Safe Place, he found the delivery note and warranty for the broken one, and much to our surprise the guarantee still had several months to go. So we boxed it up and called the manufacturers to find out where it should be taken. They organised a courier and it was collected on Monday. Today the doorbell rang and a driver from DHL (remember that) wanted a package signed for. It was addressed to us and from the chainsaw company, but was rather on the small side for what we were expected. Anyway, we opened it ... and discovered a dimmer unit for a marionette theatre.

We phoned the chainsaw people to tell them that the wrong parcel had been sent, and we phoned the marionette theatre people that we had their dimmer unit - did they have our chainsaw? No they didn't, and luckily they were only in the next village and came to collect their package. We managed to piece together part of the story; both our packages were collected on Monday by the same courier - from Target, not DHL - and it seems both were delivered to the chainsaw factory in Droitwich. It was realised that the dimmer unit should have gone to Birmingham for repair, was repackaged and by some insane logic, sent to us. The chainsaw people assure me that the saw is still in their workshop being repaired and should be back with us next week.

The most curious bit of all this is why and how DHL (the worst company in the world to deal with, according to the poor chainsaw woman who was trying to sort out the muddle) got involved at all. The marionette people used Target. The chainsaw people used Target. Yet the package arrived in a DHL van, the delivery label was a printed DHL label, but with the Target sender reference number. Are they one and the same? Was the driver moonlighting? They must be in cahoots somehow, or else how on earth did the second company know anything about our shipment?

I'll show you how to walk the dog

So, that’s Crufts over for another year, and the TV presentation just gets worse and worse. The only improvement over last year was that they got Clare Balding back to try to keep that juvenile drip Ben Fogle more under control, and she managed reasonably well, though he did sneak in a few excruciatingly amateur moments when she momentarily dropped her guard. The main problem, though, is that the BBC doesn’t seem to realise it’s a dog show and viewers want to see the dogs, not the trade stands and listen to the presenters’ anecdotes. Imagine the furore if the Wimbledon coverage concentrated on chats with spectators, discussion of the quality of the strawberries and cream and a selection of the souvenirs available in the shop but only a cursory glimpse of the final game of the tournament. How narked would footy fans be if the only televised football they got was the edited highlights of the FA Cup, not even the whole match? There’d be riots in the streets.

To those who don’t know, Crufts is the only show that you can’t just enter – your dog has to qualify for entry by getting winning places in certain classes at a limited number of other shows throughout the year, so just being able to enter is an achievement. It’d be nice to actually see more of the classes being judged, and have knowledgeable commentators like Frank Kane explaining to the non-showing viewers what’s going on, what the judge is looking for, etc. A special programme about the other activities would be good; the gamekeepers’ classes, the obedience, the agility, the flyball. And, instead of Mary Ray’s now rather tedious and lack-lustre heelwork-to-music (I thought circus animal acts were considered to be poor taste nowadays?) as a warm-up to the final competition for Best in Show how much more interesting and educational (for example, not many people realise that the King Charles Spaniel and Cavalier King Charles Spaniel are two different breeds) would be a parade of all 208 recognised breeds with a commentary briefly describing the origins and history of each. That way the general public would get a better understanding of why the various breeds were developed they way they are; their functions dictating to great extent their form. Surely being taken seriously wouldn’t be too much to ask.

Please please tell me now

With Piglet being a weirdo and needing a special diet, the official version of which requires the relinquishment of several minor appendages for each purchase, I've been scouring the intermaweb for equivalent homemade foods. In the main it's been fairly successful and he seems to be doing all right*. But I have encountered one particular problem; the recipes are Merkin, and need translation into English measurements for convenience, so I started googling. This got me even more muddled, because it appears that, not only are our cups a different size to Merkin ones (ours hold 10 fl oz, theirs hold 8 fl oz), the weight of a cup varies according to its contents**. An American cup of plain flour weighs 4.3 ounces while a cup of rice weighs 6.5 ounces. A cup of salt weighs a whopping 10 ounces!

So this is where I'm calling upon my US friends for help. Please can you tell me the official weight of a cup of rice flour, a cup of soya flour and a cup of cornmeal. Also, is cornmeal the same as cornflour or not? And what on earth is 'unsulfured molasses'? Is there a similar product available on this side of the herring pond?

* crosses fingers, touches wood and spits over left shoulder
** stop sniggering, Mally

A town called malice

The phone rang, and the man at the other end told me that somebody had tied a dog to the railings outside his flat, and it was cold and wet; that neither the dog warden nor the RSPCA would come out and what should he do? There's no facilities at the surgery for taking in strays so I gave him the number of another dog warden, took his number in case of enquiries and left it at that.

About ten minutes later a very muddy, very tearful client - I'll call her S - came in to give me her mobile number because one of her dogs had been chased during its walk and had run off. She'd been searching for three hours and was afraid the dog had fallen into the swollen river; in fact she'd slipped in herself a couple of times and was soaked. I got on the phone and called back the man with the 'stray' and asked him to describe the dog. As I'd hoped, the description fitted S's missing dog, so I gave her the thumbs-up and took down the man's address. To my surprise her expression turned from joy at learning the dog was located to one of worry. "Oh dear, he's not a nice man" she said. "I hope he hasn't hurt her." And off she went.

Later on I heard more details which make me feel rather angry. It turns out that a couple had found the dog loose, looked at the address on her collar and taken her home. Of course there was nobody there because S was frantically searching the fields and riverbank, so the finders called the vet's main number on the other side of the disc, and were advised that the best thing would be to tie the dog to the banisters in the stairwell outside S's flat (indoors, out of the rain) and she'd be safe there.

I was very shocked to learn that the man who rang me, who'd tried to get the RSPCA and the dog warden to take the dog away, is S's next-door neighbour, and he knew exactly who the dog was and who she belonged to. The spite and malice of his actions physically chilled me.

It was on a Wednesday morning the electrician came

If only he had. It was a tumbleweed day at work. There were no appointments booked, which in some respects was lucky because we'd had a letter to say that an engineer would be call to change the electricity meter, so the power would be off for half an hour. We'd phoned to confirm a convenient time-slot and to stress that there would be nobody there between 12 noon and 3pm; the woman on the other end of the phone duly marked the jobsheet. During surgery hours the vet and I chatted, then she went off to another surgery and I waited. At noon I went home. When I returned shortly before 3pm to open up again I found the engineer's card saying that he'd called at 12.20.

During the afternoon I was telephoned by the company to arrange another appointment. We agreed a date, and then I was asked whether morning or afternoon would be most suitable. As both are extremely inconvenient (no power means no computer, so no being able to book appointments or issue medication or sell anything) I decided on the morning.

"So the engineer will call between 8am and 1pm, madam."
"No, there'll only be someone here between 9 and 12"
"Yes, between 8am and 1pm"
"No, 9 and 12. Those are the times there'll be someone here."
"I can only book between 8 and 1, madam."

Who knows of a good wall-repair man? I seem to have made a head-shaped dent in the one by the phone.

Living in a box

As the more intuitive among you might have guessed, one of my interests is dogs; their care, health, breeding etc, and one of the things that gets me warm under the collar is people’s less-than-appropriate treatment of them. The indulgence of ‘furbabies’ (now there’s a word that makes me want to vomit) is as much a form of cruelty as a whipping – dogs are separate species, not deformed hairy children, and should be treated in a manner suitable for their needs. A dog’s needs are really very simple; basically he needs food, exercise, shelter, medical treatment when required and, because he’s of a social species, he needs company. Having a single dog in the home is fine as long as he gets the opportunity to socialise with his own kind several times a week, as well as the company of his owners. This is one aspect where too many dogs are let down. Too many dogs are left ‘home alone’ while their owners work full time – and what’s worse, many are crated for these hours. Now a dog crate can be very useful – it’s a secure space for him when travelling and a familiar secure den if you and your dog are staying away from home. Crated dogs are more likely to be allowed in hotel rooms, for example, rather than the totally unacceptable alternative of having to stay in the car overnight. Crates are handy with a puppy – he can be popped into it if you need to go shopping, knowing that he can’t eat your furniture or electrocute himself on your wiring in your absence. They can be handy for house-training during the night; you have the pup in his crate by your bed and, because they don’t like to soil their beds, when he needs to relieve himself in the night the noise he makes in his discomfort will wake the owner who can then take him out to the garden before popping him back to bed again.

With a blanket over the top and the door open, an adult dog has a secure den where he feels safe.

However some people – and from what I’ve read on various canine internet fora, more commonly in America – misuse crates badly. Firstly, because they’ve heard that crating helps house-train, they assume that simply putting the pup into the crate means that he’ll magically be able to contain his bladder and bowels for hours, not realising that they’ll need to get up during the night to take him out instead of having him mess on the floor if he wasn’t crated. Forcing him to soil his bed only causes distress and sets housetraining back weeks. I've never used crates for my dogs - I dislike broken nights so I'd rather mop up the kitchen floor in the morning when I'm housetraining a puppy!

Even worse, too many adult dogs are locked in their crates, like a battery chicken, the whole day while their owners are at work. Then again if the people go out for the evening. Then the dog’s alone all night too, while the people are asleep. Some poor creatures spend 20 out of 24 hours locked in a space barely big enough to turn around and the owners think it’s acceptable! No, no, no! Misuse of crates like this is out-and-out cruelty. The maximum length of time a dog should be crated is about 4 hours, preferably less. As a rule of thumb if a dog has been crated the owner should release him before the owner needs to use the lavatory. If the owner's uncomfortable, the dog might be as well. It only takes a little imagination and consideration.

Why do so many people fail to realise that animal ownership (any animal, not just dogs) is a privilege, not a right? If they can’t give a dog the treatment it deserves they should rethink their options, and if they can’t change their lifestyle to suit the dog, they shouldn’t inflict such a miserable existence on the poor thing. It's not as if it's that difficult to pay someone to come and take your dog for a walk at lunchtime, and stay in of an evening if you've been out all day.

You get told "Oh, he's quite happy, he sleeps all day." Erm ... what are his options? He can hardly read a book, or watch TV, or surf the net, can he? He's trapped, and all he can do to stop going out of his mind with boredom is sleep his life away until he dies. The dogs are the victims here – they have no choice. It’s not very different to the existence that was, and in areas still is, inflicted on the Romanian orphans.

(By the way, that dog seen on the far side of the canal at the MongMeet, and that caused such curiosity, wasn't a Labradoodle or any of the other fashionable overpriced crossbreeds. It was simply an ordinary standard poodle.)

Twinkle, twinkle, little star

I just heard my cyber-friend Libs (real name Alison, but her Forum username was Liberty, after one of her dogs) has died. She recovered from the coma that she'd been in some months ago, maybe with help from all of you who wished her well, and was discharged from hospital. But sadly the recovery was short-lived.

She was one of the glorious people who, from the instant you meet them you feel you've known forever. We used to meet up at Crufts each year (I'm so sad I couldn't make it last year) and drink red wine poured from a Ribena bottle into plastic beakers, giggling like schoolgirls. Carla, Libs and I embarrassed another friend by whooping and cheering when she handled her Shar Pei to Best of Breed, and everyone else looked down their noses at us. I was so hoping there'd be another opportunity, despite her having been so very ill; she kept the details very quiet and was always unfailingly cheerful, never giving a hint of how seriously ill she actually was.

Bless you Libs. Although you'll be very greatly missed I'm glad your pain is now gone and you're reunited with your own absent friends. I'll raise a glass of Ribena to the brightest new star in the heavens.

Three wheels on my wagon

How cool is this? I wish the dogs were as well-trained! :D

Leaving on a jet plane

As we all know there are many concerns for the health of not only the population but also the planet. We're told the population is becoming more obese and we all need to cut our carbon emissions, and so Gordon has slapped a 'green tax' on air travel. (Do we think for a nano-second that the revenue will be spent on 'green issues'? Do we bollocks.) With a bit of lateral thinking both these problems can be tackled at once. Bear with me.

When it comes to the tricky problem of baggage allowances and excess payment due, would it not be much fairer to give a total weight allowance per passenger, person and bags, and not just the weight of the bags? The average baggage allowance for European flights is 20kg; a small person with full allowance would still weigh less in total than an obese person, but the porker is still allowed a baggage allowance on top, without penalty. How can it be fair for a light person to be given what is effect a fine for having a bag that weighs 21kg, when in total they still weigh less than a heavy person who can then add a further 19kg to the weight on the plane, and yet not get penalised? With a total weight allowance system the fat person would have to pay a surcharge simply to travel at all, and the skinny person could take another suitcase without penalty. A blubber-surcharge or the risk not being able to take any luggage would surely be an incentive to lose weight - especially for the return journey (no stuffing one's face and bloating on holiday)! If the options of losing weight or paying extra are both unacceptable then maybe fewer people would fly, so less carbon would be put into the atmosphere, especially at the altitude where it does the most harm.

The weather outside is frightful

A mere four inches of snow on an ungritted road means that nobody's going anywhere!


But some people thought it was very exciting to sniff out crumbs fallen from the bird feeder.


But then they got cold feet and had to come running in again.

Pounding away, pounding away

It was when Ned wanted to order some new clothes and we checked his measurements that he realised his belt had stretched (the tape-measure was checked against a metal rule), and his figure was less sylph-like than he thought, that we decided that the time had come to liberate the man I married from his tomb of too, too solid flesh. Accordingly I dusted off the diet books bought during my angst-ridden teenage years, Ned contributed his copy of the F-Plan diet, which involves eating the greatest amount of roughage for the lowest number of calories, and I started planning the campaign.

I'd always thought that the more roughage one ate, the faster things passed through one's system. Not so with Ned - his insides seem to have gone into a state of shock and have decided to hang on to all food in case no more is available. In other words, he's full of it. And no, it's not particularly blustery at Genie Towers either. Thank heaven for small mercies. Ned was a very naughty boy today though because after his walk with his gang they adjourned to the pub for lunch and he had ham, egg and chips and a pint. I thought he'd be coming home for lunch so I waited for him before I ate. By the time he arrived I'd gone through the hunger barrier so didn't bother. I don't think this is how other people's diets are meant to work. However it seems to be working, and he's lost 10lb in the past three weeks. Unfortunately I can't just give him his cardboard-and-water and sit and scoff other stuff so I've had to join him on the regime, and I've lost 5lb, taking my BMI down to 18.1 but because I still have wobbly bits I'm not panicking that I'll disappear quite yet. If he and I could just average out our BMIs (his comes in the 'Lardboy' category) we'd probably be all right. Because he's already had a main meal today I ought not to do our roast tonight, but I've not eaten so I'm going to. He can just have a teeny portion. But I won't do a pudding, and I'll drink the wine.

Each little bird that sings

Ned was wondering whether Bernard Matthews' next advertising slogan will be "Bootiflu".