The Idler

A Country Diary: 57

SOME DAYS ARE GOOD, some days are bad. Sunday was a bad one. Well, the evening was, anyway. First Victoria and I had been arguing about cleaning. I suggested that maybe she’d like to clean up her pony’s shit from the yard occasionally and she screamed that she did her best and if I didn’t like it I could leave. So I poured a beer with the intention of drinking it while silently fuming, alone in my study. But as I was about to light a cigarette, I was aware of a smell that smelt a lot like dogshit. Slowly and with horror I realised that it was dogshit. There was a dog turd right there on the study floor. And it was smeared all over the study floor, and my shoes. Upon furher inspection I found that it was smeared in other places as well. Clearly I had half trod in it without noticing and then spread it around with my new Converse trainers. We realised that the culprit was Lulu, my neighbour’s obnoxious little Scots terrier. Our neighbour had been babysitting that day and clearly the dog had been with her. “I’m going to kill that fucking dog!” I bellowed, as I scrubbed at my study floor with a scrubbing brush and a bowl of bleachy water. “It’s banned. Banned from this house.” I didn’t like Lulu anyway, as I suspected her of scaring away our hens. Also, she jumps at your legs with muddy feet, an unpardonable sin in my book. Added to that she tries to latch on when you go for a walk, and then whines pitiably when you shut the gate on her and shout “Home! Home!”

THE NEXT MORNING I fed the hens only to find that we are down to just four: our lovely cockerel has vanished, and the beautiful white spotty hen. This is getting ridiculous. Now we have a young cockerel, a medium-sized chick and its mother, plus one more young hen. None is laying eggs. As fast as we replace them, they seem to get picked off. I’m wondering whether we should get a dog about the place. Maybe that would deter Mr Fox, who seems to have no fear of coming along during the day and picking off his choice of supper. I’m convinced somehow this is Victoria’s fault but I haven’t quite figured out exactly how yet. Strangely the two bunnies have survived. Somehow they have figured out how to escape from Fox.

THE PONY keeps escaping. Victoria found it on a neighbouring farm a mile away the other day. And a week ago, we found a note on the kitchen table which read simply: “HORSE LOOSE”. Luckily some cows got loose at around the same time, which definitely was not our fault, so the fact that perhaps through our own incompetence our pony had escaped was camouflaged by the cows on the loose. Phewph! Maybe we’re not cut out for this sort of thing. The vegetable patch is a mess, although it has been good and productive this year. The test now is whether my ten Brussell sprouts plants will make it. They seem to have recovered from the latest caterpillar attack, so we’ll see.

25.09.07