I hate bloody fireworks. Why do they have to make a noise? Isn’t it enough for people to see the pretty lights without the bloody bangs? We had a terrible night with our dogs, one dog particularly. He spent the night or most of it in bed with us, lying on Mrs Summerhouse’s pillow while she tried to sleep just below it. Anyway this seemed like an appropriate weekend to post a retro retirement blog from 2013 about the same dogs. It’s mostly jokes and a bit of a ramble, but there were compensations back then because it was hard at the beginning and there are times when it’s still challenging and this was one of them. The boy did good on the train (twice) last week so there are, as I say, compensations but still silent fireworks would be a big help. Fat chance.
So that was one thing we learned. After the last puppy blog it will come as no surprise when I tell you that we’ve learned something else, that : Puppies = poos and pees = pads and papers.
In a recent survey of dog owners – sample size 2 – they said 95% of poos and wees were on the pad or on paper. Good, but time consuming because when they do their thing you have to change the pad or paper. More interestingly newspaper had a higher success rate than the highly expensive pads. Using newspapers does, however, raise a whole different set of issues and not issues we might otherwise have thought about. It’s financially comforting that papers are better than highly expensive pads. I think there may be a monopoly going on with the training pads companies like the energy companies.
So we use newspaper whenever we can. The problem is we only buy a paper on Saturday and Sunday and frankly this nowhere near covers the demand. Oh for the days when the papers had more pages. Curse the newspaper industry. So we’ve been taking the unusual step of buying two papers. It increase the financial outlay but at least we get to read them first. Well that is until we made the big mistake of buying The Sunday Times. Yes, it’s big, yes, and there was satisfaction in seeing the puppies pee and crap on it but the problem was we felt soiled reading it. As my wife said it’s all posh gits and property, not to mention AA Gill and Clarkson (I admit to liking Clarkson on Top Gear but I intend to have treatment). We tried The Independent – rubbish – not journalistically you understand, but it’s too small and shiny to be of use to us. Yorkshire Post next week.
And nearly, finally, I thought I would include a picture of the puppy’s / doggy’s toys. Or a selection of. Their favourites are the 5 on the right – shower cleaner; plastic shampoo bottle, half-eaten loofah; plastic circular container and the top off of my shaving foam. The rest, the ‘bought at great expense’ items, are played with occasionally but with nowhere near the passion of the five ‘not for you puppies’ items above.
Finally, I’m going to add some Tommy Cooper jokes to my blogs. It’s a bit self-indulgent but I don’t care. I noticed that Simon Hoggart in The Guardian is not above filling out his column with a few jokes. Of course we can’t all have Barry Cryer providing those jokes but I can do better than that. I have Tommy Cooper – a voice from the grave, ha ha. To digress from my digression I like Simon Hoggart’s column, it is written in short sections. As you know by now I don’t believe in labels but if I did I suppose it would be said I suffered from ADHD. And I love Paul Merson’s report on the radio about the ‘condition’. He said, “I wasn’t feeling great, I went to the doctor’s and he said I had ADHD or something, I wasn’t really listening”. So, yes, short is good and excellent for the puppies who like their instructions / commands either short or non-existent.
And as this is another blog about the puppies I thought it quite reasonable to finish off with 3 doggy jokes.
A man takes his Rottweiler to the vet.
“My dog’s cross-eyed, is there anything you can do for him?”
“Well,” says the vet, “let’s have a look at him”
So he picks the dog up and examines his eyes, then checks his teeth.
Finally, he says “I’m going to have to put him down.”
“What? Because he’s cross-eyed? ”
“No, because he’s really heavy”
I bought a greyhound about a month ago,
A friend of mine said to me,
‘what are you going to do with it?’
I said ‘I’m going to race it’.
He said ‘by the look of it, I think you’ll beat it’
And he said ‘My dog doesn’t eat meat’.
I said ‘Why not?’.
He said ‘We don’t give him any’
As I’ve said before, humour at all times.