With an alarm set I didn’t sleep well. I got up just before the alarm, made some toast, and watched an episode of “Superstore” before getting the dogs into the boot of the car. We drove out to the garage where we left the car for its MOT and walked home. As we came home I did my usual thing of making the dogs stop and sit every time we needed to cross a road, and to wait until all the cars had passed. Unfortunately my idiot magnet was again at full power, and one driver stopped and demanded we walked across the road. I explained that the dogs were learning *not* to walk in front of cars, and he saw that as a personal affront.
There was no reasoning with the chap. We turned round and went back the way we’d come until he went away. The dogs are learning (slowly) and I don’t want to undermine any good that they have learned. I particularly want to avoid the behaviour that we saw from two small children who were waiting at the pelican crossing to cross the road with their mother. As they waited for the green man to light up, so they ran round her in circles; each circle taking each child three feet into the road.
We had another minor episode when the dogs ran up the wrong footpath into the car park at Asda, but a blast on the whistle brought them all back. Several passers-by commented how impressed they were with my dogs’ obedience. I smiled – when it works, whistle training is rather impressive to watch.
Once home I made a cuppa for me and er indoors TM”, and got us a cake each. We seem to have a lot of that right now. I then had my morning’s peer into cyberspace (somewhat later than usual). Between Whatsapp messages, emails, LinkedIn messages and Facebook, nearly two hundred people had sent me birthday wishes yesterday, and the appeal for the goat sanctuary has currently raised over a hundred and eighty quid.
I did chuckle when I read a thread on Facebook on the Hastings Old Town page. The people of Hastings have suddenly realised that the recent Brexit deal was rather bad for professional fishermen. Having been very loudly pro-Brexit since the moment the thing was first proposed, many of the people of Hastings were (rather pathetically) whinging that this was not the Brexit they voted for, and were shamelessly looking for someone to blame for having misled them.
I can’t pretend to be an advocate of Brexit, but surely this isn’t to blame here. The fishing industry of Hastings has been dying on its arse for years. I can remember a primary school outing to a fishmonger in Hastings fifty years ago when we were told that most Hastings-based fishmongers got their stock from Billingsgate as it was cheaper to do so. And that was fifty years ago.
I went upstairs and got on with a little Lego project that I’d had in mind for some time until the garage phoned. My car had failed its MOT for want of a light bulb. They said they would sort it by the time it took me to walk over to them, so I got the dogs onto their leads and we walked back to the garage.
Having been a model of good behaviour earlier this morning, Pogo was then an absolute nightmare. He saw another dog that he didn’t like the look of and yanked hard back on the lead whilst shaking his head. He immediately pulled his collar off and ran straight across the road. As cars brakes screeched I screamed at him, he stopped dead in his tracks, and sheepishly came back to me.
He got seriously told off.
After that, the rest of fetching my car was something of a disappointment.
I must admit that I collected my car with a sense of “now what?” The thing is fourteen years old and has done a lot of miles. I was rather expecting a catastrophic MOT failure today, and to spend the rest of the week sorting a new car. But as the nice man in the garage said, I’ve had the car regularly serviced, I know what issues it has, and I am better off driving it until such time as it finally does have its catastrophic failure. The alternative is to get rid of a perfectly serviceable car and exchange it for (quite frankly) an unknown quantity.
I came home and finished my Lego project. You can see it in the piccie above. The white car on the right is Lego set 395-1 “1909 Rolls-Royce” from 1976. You can get it on eBay for seriously silly amounts of money (like over a hundred quid!). The yellow one on the left is one I made today (mostly) to the same plans with odds and ends from my box of spare Lego. I wonder if I might sell that for seriously silly amounts of money? I could use the profit to buy more Lego….
We turned on the telly and watched the Prime Minister’s announcement of how he intends the country to come out of lock-down. He plans to move slowly and cautiously, which is a sensible thing to do. If only he would brush his hair he has the potential to go down in history with Churchill and Lloyd George. I suspect he won’t realise that potential though.
er indoors TM” sorted out a rather good bit of dinner and we scoffed it whilst watching some episodes of “The Great”. They were rather good.
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