This and that

I was woken at 3.00 am yesterday morning by Dino Murby loudly banging a metal tag round his collar onto his emptied metal water bowl.  This is the dog equivalent of a rain dance and worked.  Dino, who resembles an Irish wolf hound with four inch legs, is visiting for the week.  He is old and fairly amiable and Dolly is managing to tolerate him. When he’s not asleep and snoring, his main purpose in life is the pursuit of food.  He follows us around the house with the clear question, “Can you eat it?” in his eyes.   We tried giving him the odd treat in addition to his regular meals but found that he is believes in biting the hand that feeds him and almost has your fingers off in his haste.  I now throw treats at him and find he is a skilled mid-air catcher. 

We did have a spot of bother round Lake CouCou the other day, when he identified all the fishermen’s tents as potential kitchens, hastened towards them and entered one or two.   He managed to get his snout into a tub of wiggling bait before I caught and leashed him.   His eating habits have one advantage – he will eat any scraps, however humble and insignificant, that fall from the work surface during food preparation.  Mike believes that Richard and Sue, his owners, should hire him out as a floor cleaner.       

Due to the length of his years and the shortness of his legs, Dino has had to remain on gardening duties with Mike when Dolly and I do our longer walks.  We met up with Sue King and Brenda Durham on Wednesday for 7.5 kms worth of Grange d’Ans north.  I have tried this once before on my own, but took a wrong turning and didn’t complete it.  I only say this because on both walks, an old French woman darted out of her house and began cross examining me/us.  She may have been being friendly in a  brusque way.  We did our best to answer her questions.  (Mostly the equivalent of “You’re not from round here, are you?”)   I was just explaining where I lived, and the exact location of our house when she said that she couldn’t understand us if we couldn’t speak French.  This was a shame as I had thought I was speaking French, as did Brenda and Sue.    We were probably sounding like the policeman in Ello, ello and the elderly French are certainly intolerant of bad accents. 

 Thursday I wandered round Excideuil market which I do love - a proper old style French market in a proper old French town.  Small but full of plenty - flowers, fruit, herbs, fish, cheese and even very small tables at which farmers or local gardeners display their single stock – bottles of nut oil or baskets of small plums . 

 

 

Yesterday was not full of incident.  I never  got back to sleep after the 3.00 am incident of the metal tag and was consequently slowed down all day.  The good news, though, is that Yvette Bickerton is now out of hospital and Mike and I visited with two dogs and a cake.