A Week with an Incontinent Dog

At the end of last week we swapped our daughter for a 16-year old incontinent Labradoid dog.

No, this isn’t Russia. We don’t tend to trade children in this country. It’s only on a temporary basis. Blondie’s owners have gone to the Canaries on a week’s holiday and since the Daughter is the best friend of their daughter, they have taken our 16-year old with them.

So we are harbouring Blondie – and a bag full of old towels and blankets with which to line her basket. We’ve taken up the rugs and put our bar stools on the sofas to discourage her from sleeping on them, but so far she’s only had one accident.

Not the canine variety

It’s a testimony to two good walks a day and the evident comfort of sharing digs with her old Labradorable mucker, Alf. The pair of them are like Little & Large together, though the bow-legged blonde has got whiter and less upright with age. She’s as deaf as a post and somewhat purblind, which means that you have to tap her gently on her flank to wake her up in the mornings and last thing at night you have to retrieve her from the great outdoors by torchlight. But she eats heartily and walks well for what amounts to an exceptional age for any dog with more than a phial of pure Labrador blood in her veins.

Even Myrtle is quite unperturbed by her presence in the living area. Myrtle was chased once by another of Alf’s girlfriends, Ella the canine loose cannon. In her panic, she leaped from the edge of the mezzanine onto the metal flue of the wood-burning stove and clung to the elbow joint. Fortunately, it was spring and the fire wasn’t lit. We managed to retrieve Myrtle from her precarious perch, but she’s been a bag of nerves ever since. However, she seems to live by the credo: black dog bad, yellow dog good.

Anyway, the upshot of the matter is that I’ve been forced to change my quotidian habits this week. Blondie’s deafness means that I’ve had to drop the bike in favour of my own two feet, so I can stay right by her in the event of a passing car. So far, we haven’t been passed by a single car, but I’m ready to spring into action and usher her to the side of the road.

Walking the dawgs, as Rufus Thomas might have had it, has given me the chance to read for longer than my customary ten minutes every night before drifting off to sleep, only to be awoken with a start by the sound of a book falling to the floor. It’s a sign alas of my fading powers that I now have to wear reading glasses even outdoors. Were any motorist to pass, I imagine it must be a bizarre sight: a bespectacled man in his nephew’s thermal climbing trousers, peering at a paperback book and accompanied by two yella dawgs. ‘Hot dang, that’s a bi-zarre sight, Darleen!’

I’ve been reading about the internecine struggle between John, Paul, George, Ringo, Yoko, Alan Klein, Phil Spector and other interested parties post Beatles break-up in Peter Doggett’s riveting You Never Give Me Your Money and a lengthy exposé of Ireland’s calamitous financial collapse in Vanity Fair: a salutary morality tale for our times, which highlights not only the greed but also the blatant stupidity of these financial top-dogs who vote themselves enormous salaries and unjustifiable bonuses.

So it has its evident compensations, looking after an incontinent dog. It’s those little variations on the daily routine that keep you on your toes and stave off the onset of senility.

If I can somehow get her into the boot of the car on Saturday morning, I’ll take her back to her home and trade her for The Daughter. It’ll be back to pedal power and walking a single dog afterwards. The next challenge in this life of constant Indiana Jones-ish escapades will be to work out a way of rigging up a book to my handlebars so I can read and ride twice daily. Some sort of magnifying glass with built-in rear view mirror contraption, I fancy.

Heath Robinson would have been the man to consult, but sadly he is no longer here to advise me. I’ll let you know how I get on without him.