Sunday 21 September 2008

The mystery of the missing Steiff teddy

No idea of weight; not much idea of alcohol intake but I’ll take wild guess at 14.0 units altogether yesterday; 1,233 days to go; Chester.

We finally got to bed around 2.30 a.m. and I was pleasantly surprised by how well I felt when I snapped awake after my usual six hours. No doubt my spirits were lifted by the sure and certain knowledge that I would not need to go to a ball again tonight. I was still aching from my fall down the stairs, but this pain was soon forgotten when I opened my computer and clicked on a YouTube link kindly sent me by my brother. While I know nothing about football, and care even less, the subtitled version of Downfall from Hitler’s bunker, allegedly describing the current travails of Newcastle United, quickly reduced me to utterly helpless laughter.

The LTCB had invited her parents and brother to lunch and produced a perfect feast, centred on a superbly tender fillet of beef from her excellent local butcher, which she had rolled in herbs and then roasted to perfection. As if that were not enough, she followed it up with home-made sticky toffee pudding. Really, life does not get much better than this, though I am conscious that it is completely screwing my efforts to write a blog about a miserable, elderly curmudgeon’s solitary slide into the grave.

A second sitting of lunch was laid on for a friend of the LTCB’s who had spent the morning competing in some sort of triathlon, and we then took the dog out for a longish walk around the Meadows. On the way we met another Border terrier called Rocky, whose owner warned us that he could be “grumpy”. We assured him that he almost certainly could not hold a candle to my dog in the grumpiness stakes. But we were struck by his choice of language, as a couple had uttered precisely the same warning about their Border terrier bitch, which we had encountered while out for a walk yesterday. There followed a conversation about breed characteristics and the way that owners take after their dogs, and vice-versa, which did not seem to be heading in a direction that was much to my advantage.

We returned to the LTCB’s house for tea and her friend took a long series of photographs of the dog, cooing that he looked exactly like a Steiff teddy bear. Which indeed he does. One of these would brighten this blog up no end, but she did not even offer to send them to me, saying that it would be “much easier” for her to post them on Facebook instead. Which indeed it might, but for the fact that I have no idea whether she has actually done so, or how to track them down if she has. Given that there are nine people on the site with my own fairly uncommon combination of names, the chances of finding some dog pictures when equipped only with the Christian name “Sally” seem slim in the extreme.

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