We had to put my lovely girl to sleep tonight. She had a restless night last night, and despite having had a strong painkiller earlier today, she was in a lot of discomfort and I guessed that we'd reached the end of the road. I feel dead guilty, and also like I might wake up and find I've just dreamed it.

Bye little sausage. I hope that where you are you're sleeping in the sun and you can eat all the chicken bones you want.

Maybe I should try rubbing it on my face.

So go on and call me a bore but I just came home from another vet appointment. Stuff was achieved - steroid injection, antibiotics, er, rectal exam (sorry dog) - and before I left I asked about the eye infection which wasn't yet completely cleared up.

(If I'm honest, I was trying to squeeze some extra value out of the, what, fourth? appointment in six weeks, cause in my mind's eye, I could see myself rocking up there in a couple of days to deal with the eye thing again. Even the lovely man, who doesn't have a stingy bone in his body, said after the last appointment "Every time I leave that place I feel like I've been mugged." I wouldn't like to sound disrespectful/inappropriate/cheap - delete as appropriate - but we have poured an awful lot of money down this particular hole and still we have a speculative non-diagnosis, a rubbish speculative prognosis and thus a probably-dying dog, so it's not the expenditure I mind as much as the fact that we don't seem to have anything to show for it. Not that I'm bitter, etc.)

Anyways, the vet does this test which involve sticking what look like strips of paper in her eyes for exactly a minute each, which, you know, after a rectal exam brings to mind the words 'insult' and 'injury.'  Then he fetches a small box of ointment and tells me "it is very expensive, so you only need to use a tiny bit."

Now, hang on a minute pardner. This is an expensive corrective treatment for my imminently dying dog's eye which has had a little infection because it is not as moist as it should be? I mean, I will do anything for my dog, but having recently been given the news that she probably has an untreatable cancer - so untreatable that it is considered unnecessary to find a specific diagnosis - this eye ointment gave me pause for thought. Why be stingy? What am I saving it for? Why not just bung it all in there like we're havin' a party?

It turns out that you can just use ordinary moisturising eye drops. The kind that you can buy at Boots for £3. But he advised me that if I do that, I need to do it eight to ten times a day, and my dog diary is all full up what with the antibiotics, fresh food, cleaning (oh the cleaning), managing the effluvia, not to mention yay! vet visits! And worrying.

I bought the damn ointment. Cha-ching!

*Insert swearing here.*

My beloved girl dog was, up to her thirteenth year, an absolute cracker; she ran and jumped and I was regularly asked if she was a puppy. She has been in decline for almost a year. First, she began to drag her front left paw. When I got home from New York last October, she had a disconnected look in her eye and wouldn't be held, preferring to pace and wander. Her gait became increasingly wobbly and crabbed, and she fell over. She began to sleep on the floor to the side of the cushion in her bed, with just her head resting on it, and no matter how much floor space I filled with her cushions and blankets, she lay to the side of them.  She lost an alarming amount of weight and we fed her up and she put some of it back on again, but remained wizened and shrunken-looking.  She failed to respond to commands she had known and followed all her life. She stopped grooming herself, which meant I had to have a surprising discussion with the male vet about gynecological hygiene.* She developed a series of opportunistic ailments which meant she was pretty much always on a bland** diet.


Despite having been in and out of the vet's office over and over again, nothing out of the ordinary was found and pretty much everything has been chalked up to age. I've seen three different vets (from the same practice) for three different reasons over the last six weeks, and the last was the only one to tell me that my dog probably had a lesion on the brain and I needed to think about my "options" sooner rather than later.


On Good Friday I had a total and complete meltdown saying we'd have to have her put down on Saturday. The next day. What if she were suffering out of office hours and we were forced to ring the emergency cover veterinary service while our usual vets were enjoying their Easter holidays? Hi, you don't know me but can I come over so you can kill my dog? Will you take a cheque? Then, taking advantage of a brief gap in my wailing and rending of garments, we took her for a long walk in the park and she seemed perfectly fine, so who knows. By perfectly fine, I mean no worse than normal. Does that mean I've acclimatised to her being this fucked up and I'm prolonging her discomfort? She seems to enjoy eating and going for walks still. Is that not a good enough reason to let her carry on? That, and the fact that I am a gibbering, blubbering wreck at the prospect of life without her?


I've adopted the totally mature adult emotional response of eating stuff I don't really want and compulsively wandering about the intertubes, reading, browsing, shopping and lurking. I exhibit the demeanour of someone who reasons that averting their eyes and whistling means it isn't really happening. Lalalalalalalalalalalala can't hear you lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala. So that's working then.


You?





*Not mine. Ha ha she laughed cheerlessly.
**Read "homecooked." She's probably doing it on purpose for the good grub, the wily minx. As if I want another three fresh meals to prepare daily.

And now I'm going to have a little lie-down.

Oh my word, but it's been a while. I've been out and about. 

Apropos of nothing, isn't this place amazing? It's a recently restored Victorian theatre in Teddington, with original scenery and paintings and a balcony and loads of gorgeous stuff.

So today I have a headache like there is an ice pick in my head. And what have you been up to?

Couple-friends: pros and cons.

Quick question off the top of my head: if you are one half of a couple, and you socialise with other couples, what's your take on the dynamic? Is there a love-me-love-my-dog aspect? Beloved dear friend and barely tolerated boor of a partner? Is there an element of marital drama, or perhaps political debate, for which you provide a convenient audience? The lovely man and I have few couple-friends, and when we have dipped our toes into the couple-friend water, we have found it not always agreeable.

We frequently chuckle about the evening we enjoyed a spontaneous takeaway with one of the lovely man's friends and his wife and they bickered all night, culminating in Mrs berating Mr at the table for always ordering too much food. "Oh X! You always order too much food!" she cried, as he decanted all the various dregs of tins and boxes into one container. (In my head, after she leaves the room, he takes an appreciative glance at it all and says, "There! That was just enough," before he puts it in the bin, but maybe I'm imagining that.) Frequently, a satisfying takeaway chez nous is completed with one of us accusing the other of ordering too much, just for the fun of it. I know, it's all quite madcap here.

Memorably, there was the time when we were invited for dinner at the home of (other) friends of the lovely man,* and the conversation turned to the fact that they were no longer having sex. By which, I mean that the husband shared that with us during dinner. I will add that 1) this was the first time I had met either of them and 2) for four of us, they had served no more than a single bottle of wine (while the two bottles we brought remained unopened); it's safe to say I wasn't ready in any way for that level of disclosure, or the manner in which it was achieved.

I'm a little gunshy now.


* Hmm, perhaps a theme is emerging.

Stuff I thought about on the way to the post office.

I'm pretty sure there was one of these in my window when I was a kid.

Image via www.parenthood.com

Apparently they are no longer de rigueur as people don't want perverts to know where their kids sleep.

Were there fewer perverts in the 70s? Or maybe not, but people weren't as frightened of them?

I can't think of a time when children were known in the general vernacular as 'tots.'

Some listy oversharing of a domestic nature

1) I have never cleaned my laptop keyboard. N.e.v.e.r.

2) I had "friends" round for Thanksgiving a few years ago, and, as dinner wasn't ready until *nightmare* 10pm, my "guests" filled the drunken hours by pounding Champagne and carrying my computer around iChatting to their friends and family in the States, and in gormlessly holding it aloft onehandedly, "someone" put their thumb through the keyboard. I had it replaced. I don't think that counts as cleaning it.

3) Even so, when I'm using the computer, I always make sure I wash my hands before handling food. Except when I a) forget and b) am too lazy.

4) I have also never cleaned the screen.

5) When it came back from having the keyboard replaced, someone had cleaned the screen.

6) There are multiple jars of peanut butter in the cupboard. Some of them are supposed to be used exclusively for filling the Kong. The rest have NOT FOR DOGS written on them with permanent marker. Every so often, I get suspicious that someone (you know who you are) might have used the wrong jar, and - even worse - double dipped the knife. I then move the suspect jar onto the top shelf, where it sits with other half-jars of suspect pb, some of which have NOT FOR DOGS written on the lids. Then I buy a new jar, write NOT FOR DOGS, and the cycle begins again.

7) I am kind of a toilet fascist. I badger the lovely man endlessly about stuff to do with the toilet. Basically, I want it to be like no one has ever used the toilet. If he must insist on using the toilet, I want him to leave no indication that anyone was ever there. In the loo, I want the illusion that I live alone.

8) Once a week, I wash the whole loo - walls, skirting board, floor, door, sink, toilet and bath where applicable - with bleach. I feel guilty for refusing to reuse cloths - kitchen roll only please - but I cannot be doing with the way a cloth just moves dust and dog hair and schmutz around. If there is *urk* hair or any such thing, it is not clean. And I must know that the only cloths used on the toilet are not used on other stuff, and then they have to be washed on their own and putting a cloth through the wash on its own is hardly green, so... No.

9) If the toilets and sheets are clean, and my cupboards are tidy, I'm golden. I can tolerate, and I positively radiate, all other kinds of disorder and chaos. This trait is crazymaking for anyone who has ever had to live with me.

10) I don't mind washing up, but I quite dislike loading and unloading the dishwasher.