So much to give

Number 13 in my series of retro retirement blogs. Exhumed from the year 2013 and a very early version of a theme that was to endure, namely our retirement experiences with our dogs. It got much better as we all went along. I apologise for having two retro retirement blogs this week. It was a problem with being at our Heanor house and internet connections. Back to normal on Tuesday I hope. Nice photo at the end rather than the beginning.

This morning my wife was, surprisingly for her, quite weepy. The full ‘horror’ (her words, not mine) of what we have taken on and its foreverness has sunk in. She is suffering from Post Traumatic Shock. Ah, but, you say, you’ve gained not lost something or somebody. No, not true, we’ve lost the life we used to / could have had. The scene at the end of Braveheart when Mel Gibson cries out ‘freedom’ is commonly thought to relate to Scottish independence, this is quite wrong, in fact he had just acquired two puppies and had, just at that point, come to realise, like my wife, that his life had changed, his freedom gone forever.

I know I said I was only going to blog once a week but I have so much love that I want to share it. I want to tell the world that our lives have changed. To say our lives are full of shit is no longer a metaphor.

After a particularly exhausting ‘watch’ of poo and pee removal I was put in mind of a classic quote from history. Of Remi Moses, ex WBA and England midfielder, it was said he was ‘like dog shit, all over the place!” It took me a while to remember the source of this wit. Was it Satre, Aristotle, Churchill, Wilde? Ah no, I remember it was Big Ron (Atkinson), manager, at the time, of WBA. Big Ron was a man who knew a lot about shit as his later comments on Marcel Desailly proved.

You couldn’t imagine Arsene Wenger (il est comme le merde  de chien, il est partout) or Jose Mourinho (imagine Portugese equivalent) saying something so insightful, not Big Sam (Allerdyce) or Brucie at Hull City Tigers, actually hold that thought, not Arsene and Jose anyway.

Continuing with the football theme the puppies are creating poo and pee everywhere. We operate a zonal marking system to try and stop them, within the spirit of the law. We don’t mark man to man or rather person to puppy, we pick up the attacker as they come into our zone of the kitchen. You either get your intervention in early or you’re scraping up the shit. We also operate a sweeper system. The person, who at any designated time, picks up the shit and pee.

Talking of Brucie – the dancing kind rather than the footballing kind – it is but a short step from shit on the floor to shit on the TV. Our TV is every bit as full of shit as our kitchen floor. There just has to be a TV programme in what’s happening to us. Wees and Poos, a sitcom about little puppies; Agatha Christie’s, Poorot; Shit Ahoy; House at Poo Corner, no, that’s been done. We could even bring back The Golden Shit.

Of course it’s not all bad. Children we never knew we had started to appear at the house. I’m pretty sure that a lot of them are not mine / ours. So actually that’s still in the negative area. The good bits? They’re cute when they’re asleep. That’s good. Oh, and at a less immediate distance, the ailing newspaper industry is in for a rebirth. We’re getting through newspapers, toilet paper, kitchen paper towels in a manner that the Oregon forests not to mention Twin Peaks, may base their future economic growth upon. They have given new meaning to the term consuming the news. When you pick up their poos you can see exactly what they’ve been reading. Buy shares in the paper towel / toilet paper industry. Yes, I know I’m rambling. I have to go now, they’ve done another shit on the floor. The little loves.

The little loves in person