Shiny cup saga part 2

On Thursday morning I woke up unable to speak, with laryngitis.
I had to cancel my autist musicians and classes of English that evening.

As is habitual with French doctors, I was prescribed a cocktail of very strong drugs, with codeine, steroids and antihistamines all in there somewhere with the antibiotics.
I usually visit the doctor, hear the diagnosis and then chuck the drugs, but I didnt dare this time because I have a jazz workshop Saturday afternoon.

Steroids make me speedy with an underlying sort of mad anger, and codeine plus anti histamines put me to sleep. The last two days have felt a bit like a fairground ride.
The rival chemicals were battling it out last night, with steroids emerging the wakeful winner up to 4.30 am, and then the soporifics won...so I slept through my alarm at 5.30 am.

I just managed to get to the pistage trials in time to register at 7.15 am, but did not have time to give Porridge the run that she needed before her brevet.

I got to the start and sent her off into a damp field of long grass and the temptation was too much. She charged off into the dawn somersaulting and rolling with delight, totally out of control.

And then she found the pig manure.

Porridge... THERE ARE NO BEARS IN BRITTANY... really... disguise is not necessary.

So no shiny cup today. Maybe another time. A girl can dream, cant she?

Happy Sundays

It is dawn on Sunday morning, and I could have a lie in in my nice warm bed. So what do I do? I drag a reluctant Porridge away from her nice smelly mat on the living room floor.

Yes I am off to join the misogynists on a cliff top nearby, and put Porridge through her sporty paces ready for a competition looming at the end of November. Bad tempered Breton men in flat caps, fiendishly good with dogs, but less so with people will be shouting at me and other middle aged ladies and telling us what crap we are at it. Many have been called and few have been chosen (or at least been robust enough to deal with it). I think it must be the masochist in me....
This week I watched another new recruit suffer the horrors of trying to trace out a track in a field, full of right angles, acute angles, points chauds (hot points where the scent is strongest), to drop an object at the end of the track for the dog to go and find on its own. Her legs were bleeding from nettles and scratches, and she was a little upset by the time they had finished with her, but I hope she will be back. It is fun... no...really...

It is just hard to explain quite why!

I will not be going next week though.

It is my wedding anniversary.

19 years of blissful arguments.

Yep... we do argue. That is probably why we are still together. I call it a frank exchange of views...

Any suggestions as to what we should do to celebrate? That dont involve cliff tops.
I fancy a romantic meal myself, but I am open to all ideas.

Pissed (off)

Hanging out the sheets this morning, I looked down to see a very dangerous area left by Porridge. One false move and those sheets would have to go right back into the machine…or even be soaked in bleach…I am fastidious about what I lie in.
This is not Porridge’s fault (of course, how could it be, she is my dog).

She is the victim of bad example. And of irresistible odours.

The washing line is next to a hedge which is at the end of a convenient stone pathway. And this hedge has been used as a pissoir by the men of the family, who don’t want to get their feet too muddy.

The urge to have fresh air circulating about one’s privates seems to be a very French male preoccupation. It doesn’t seem to be enough to have the toilet window open. It is impossible to drive along a road after lunchtime without passing the characteristic stance and back (if you are lucky) of a pissing Frenchman. And my family have been culturally contaminated.

What is worse, they have perverted the rules. A French musician informed me that a well mannered man will never piss in a dry garden, but will only do so if it has been already moistened by rain. This is presumably to avoid the build up of unpleasant odours. My washing has been suffering from this rule breaking. After all, I can only hang it up when it is dry…

I think there is something territorial going on. This was confirmed when I took Porridge to our usual Sunday morning cliff top sporting activity, where she smells out little wooden objects and retrieves them when she feels like it, and I get shouted at by a dog trainer who thinks I am his whippet. (Those of you who are as old as I am may remember a football manager called Brian Clough. Well he has been reborn as a Breton dog trainer.)
We were standing by a hedge, watching a collie dog zigzag across an enormous field, effortlessly following the track to the object. We were about 5 people, men and women, and I was slipping off into the mildly meditative state that I enjoy when watching someone else’s dog work.

A lone jogger suddenly appeared out of the forest 100 yards away. He jogged towards us along the path and when he was level with us he turned to a tree and started to urinate. He was perhaps 2 yards away and in full view. He reached behind the tree, picked up a bottle of water that he must have left there earlier and jogged off without a word. Even my French companions were a little taken aback…except Henri, the retired sailor. “It must be his special place”, he said.

I would be very interested to know more about this urge to mark territory. Are men from other countries and cultures all harbouring a secret wish to knock down the toilet door? Are you only held back from this by little things like the law of indecent exposure which restrains the English open air enthusiast? Do tell…You’d all do it if you could get away with it, wouldn’t you?

The good, the bad and the beautiful (Helen)

Do you want the good news or the bad news?

The good news:
At last, we have got a shiny cup. It isn’t for beauty, and probably never will be, because Porridge’s nose is getting pinker and pinker. Strange how noses can so often interfere with beauty. It is for OBEDIENCE. (Yes, I am surprised as well).

The bad news:

(i) is that the automatic gearbox on the BMW estate died whilst I was about to leave pistage at Sunday lunchtime for my 25 kilometre drive home.

(ii) is that although I had 2 mobile phones with me, one of them was my old SFR which was cancelled from Saturday, and the other was my new Orange which hasn’t started working yet, although it was supposed to start working Saturday lunchtime.

(iii) is that the tempest which had been politely holding back and lulling me into a false sense of security suddenly let rip at the same moment.

(iv) is that all my fellow pisteurs took off smartly for lunch,

except for Helen and Henri, who rescued me and got drenched…

Thank you Helen for being the bearer of the shiny cup and doggy treats, three Christmas crackers that you had spare and you thought that the children might like, a piece of Christmas cake that I haven’t eaten yet but looks great, the loan of your phone to consult my sweet H to find out what to do, and last but not least for driving me 50 kilometres out of your way. You are a star.

Cold trails and obedience trials

Last week, I sat in a freezing tin hut next to a football pitch, at a meeting to organise Recherche Utilitaire this weekend. This is like pistage, but painted large. Instead of the dogs following tracks in a single field, they are expected to follow a cold trail, three hours old, for a kilometre or more. They sniff at a t-shirt, worn by the tracer for only 20 minutes, and then they must find objects scattered along the way, such as a scarf, a leather key ring, a wallet or a piece of wood.
The tracers go out at 5 in the morning to mark the scent and leave the objects, so I was rather relieved to be given the job of serving aperitifs at 7 in the evening, instead. To each their own area of expertise.

I am told that the main difficulty is that members of the public pick up the objects before the dogs get to them. I don’t expect that the wallet will last very long then, do you? It certainly wouldn’t last long in London, but here in Brittany it is more likely to be taken straight to the police station as lost property, rather than just plain stolen.
Still annoying, but in a nice kind of way.

Porridge will be participating in this three day event later on in the afternoon. She will be doing an obedience trial to obtain a certificate. The judge has already met her and suggested that I take her out for at least a 2 hour walk beforehand so that she is “calm”. This is not a side of her that I have ever seen before. I look forward to it.

Global warming?

What a turbulent day! As I left the house at dawn for pistage, the wind was gusting. The crows were playing, throwing themselves off their perches only to be caught by the wind and flung upwards into the air. A family of buzzards lives in the valley next to our house. As I drove past, one of them took off into the sky with unusual ease, 18 inches of killing machine.
By the time I got to the cliff top, the wind was strong and biting.
The dogs leapt from the cars, overexcited and barking, running with the wind in their tails. We went for our customary walk before working them, and I was bowled over like a skittle by Porridge and one of her suitors who raced up from behind me. A fight broke out between a collie and an alsatian who both had their eye on Porridge.
I finally managed to separate “Lydia” from her admiring officers and tried to get her to work.
She bolted and stole her objects from the field, kept them to chew, and wouldn’t come to heel. I fell over again, this time caught by the wind. Feeling that enough was enough, I drove home and spent the afternoon in bed with a new detective novel and chocolate, while the rain beat on my window and Porridge sprawled in front of the fire.