In sickness ...

MBNAD woman was ill. Don’t see it myself. Looked more like lying in bed, to me. I have only been ill once ever and that was when I lost my, ahem, bits. How could she have been ill? Bitches don’t have bits.

First thing in the morning on work days, a little wall-string-talking-box wakes her shouting “Good morning and welcome to prayer for the day”. She normally shouts something back at it in cat, hits a switch to shut it up, gets out of bed and into dog walkers and off we go. She usually says something like "Eeewuuugh, morning, Mossie". That morning she lay back and mumbled that she was praying that the day would go away. We went out for our early morning walk and she was really slow and ploddy. She’s not that old; younger than me in dog years. Always been good at counting, never used to lose a sheep ‘cos of not counting proper. Not sure about the witch to human years equation.

When we got back, I had my breakfast and settled down for my sleep waiting for her to go but she didn’t go out. Just got back into her bed and lay there. Moaning. So I stood by the side of the bed and resting my chin next to her sending her loving looks. I’d have got up there to hug her, said the voice. It’s nice up there, warm and snugly and you can make it smell wonderful and anyway, you’re so fat she wouldn’t have been able to throw you off. Fat? Me fat? It’s just my winter coat.

Ill only lasted one day but I wouldn’t have minded if it had gone on a bit.

We had a Here weekend with lots of sunshine and walks. When we went out in the car she muttered about getting a harness out of the box of old-white-dog things. Harnesses are for horses. No, this is for you, said the voice. When it’s warm, she’ll take the top of the car down and you can enjoy the wind and the sunshine. But you need a harness to make sure you don’t blow away in the wind. As if a fat old thing like you could blow away… This is so funny. She'll have to adjust the straps to go round you. I’ll have to tell The Cat. Blown away.

Very funny. I’m not fat. It’s just my winter coat.

Alright, the harness is to keep you safely in the car. She has one too and always wears it. Spose, so. Not sure I’m keen on the idea of “enjoying the wind and the sunshine”. It’s great, says the voice, I always felt just like Grace Kelly with my ears blowing in the wind. Who’s Grace Kelly? I ask. Just another princess, says the voice. I bet she didn’t have ears like that.

Betwiched, bothered and bewildered

So it was a There weekend. I know how to spot it now. MBNAD woman fussing about with bags the evening before, then when she gets back from not-minding sheep, it’s all busy busy quick Mossie walk, puts my tea down for me and she stuffs the bags into the car and we’re gone. I used to think that she was trying to run away from me but now I know that she just puts my tea down so that we can go quickly. Even so, I make sure that I am standing by the car before she’s ready to get in. By her door. Just in case.

Halfway There, she stops to have bread and meat. If I stick my nose next to her ear, she will usually give me the endy bits. Grand. Cow but with something hot and sharp that goes up my nose and makes me sneeze. “Thank you, Mossie”, she grumbles. Top tip, says the voice, she doesn’t much like snot in her hair.

“Wales, Powys, Mossie. Home”

This is where the magic starts. There becomes Here.

“Night night Mossie, night night Bella”.

The morning brings rain. Not gentle merciful rain, you understand, but the sort that makes you really want to curl up in front of the fire. But no, off we go walking in the rain because she wants to see the river. It’s really quite like the stuff that’s falling out of the sky. Wet. And my toes ended up pink. This is so embarrassing. The mud is a dark pink and so were my paws. I made sure I stayed away from the Dog-with-Leanings.


The Woman who lives with the Dog-with-Leanings and Toothless-Cat came to dinner.
She had a birthday.


Whatever.

They drank.

Sunday morning, off she goes to the building with the dead-people garden. Leaves me behind to go off to a cold building. With dead people in the garden. I grump at her when she gets back and watch while she does another strange thing. This is something that she does a lot. She puts lots of clothes and bed covers in wall-string-whoosh-grumble-grumble-whoosh-wheee-box. After all that, she takes the stuff out and it’s wet. She could have just gone outside to enjoy the weather and got the same effect. She hangs it up to dry and then, this is really peculiar, she gets a fold up table and a wall-string-flattener. Then she flattens the clothes and bed covers. Yes, says the voice, she’s always flattened clothes. When she’s done, they’re nice and warm and good to sleep on. Hmmm, I think that may be ok for the People’s Spaniel but not the Colliewobble.

Then MBNAD woman went off with some others in the coven to the Tanners. I try hanging onto her leg but she sent me back to my bed. “I’ll be back soon, Mossie”. Liar.

When I heard them coming back, I went to the two-catflaps room to shout at her. But she didn’t come in. So I shouted a bit more and listened carefully. I could hear her talking to me but she didn’t come through the door. Then she was laughing. Witchy laughing. Behind me. The old white dog looks up from grooming her other-worldly toes and says, Front door. She came through the Front door.

Witch.

Then she turned the magic back inside out and Here became There again. And she sat on the floor and stroked my ears.

“Night night Mossie, night night Bella”.

A case for exorcism

Visitor to dinner. They spend ages talking about whether it’s dinner, tea or supper. Don’t matter to me. It’s food. It’s either mine or it’s not. She does some weird things with some fish. Fish isn’t my favourite. I wouldn’t turn it down but I wouldn’t do what she did either. Fish skin’s nice, says the voice. She spent ages chopping and crushing and squeezing stinky things, sharp things and spicy things which she put all over the fish. But then she didn’t eat it or even cook it. She put it on a dish and wrapped it up and put it in a cupboard. This is a funny cupboard because she keeps other food in there too like milk and cheese. Peculiar thing is that things come out of there cold and they’re not cold coming out of the other food cupboards. Underneath that cupboard is another one with all the food frozen into solid lumps. There’s another one of these cupboards in Catflap Cottage and it has a wall-string because I can stick my nose round the back of it so I reckon that this must be a wall-string-cold-cupboard too.
So this bit of fish all wrapped up in its stinky-sharp-spicy sauce was left in the wall-string-cold-cupboard for a whole day and then she cooked it. What a palaver.

You wait till you get to try ice-cream, says the voice. That’s what the wall-string-freezy-cupboard is for.

In the morning she said some cat words because the house wasn’t warm. She could have just stayed in her bed and then she’d have been warm but, no, off to work. Then she got a book out and I thought, great, we’ll curl up while she reads and I snore. But this wasn’t that sort of a book. She took it upstairs and looked in a cupboard where she keeps covers for the beds and towels. More cat words. There’s a big box in there with a lot of wall-strings. It’s got flashing lights but not like the wall-string-twinkles. It seems to have something to do with warming the house up. Strikes me that isn’t natural. She pokes at it a bit and turns some handles and then says even more cat words. “Ok Mossie, we’ll have to light the fire”. The fire here is nice. It’s got strange magical coal that she never needs to refill. I spend the evening getting nearer and nearer to the magic coal. Every time I get nearer, she drags me back again. But being warm in winter is just grand. Even if I risk my tail being burnt.

“Night night Mossie, night night Bella”. Curl up warm, colliewobble. Says the voice.

And then when we wake up this morning, the wall-string-house-warmer is buzzing away and the house is warm. Possessed.

The Cat, The Witch and the Sideboard

I have a puzzle. It’s about the Tall One. Last week was all the usual nonsense about work and stuff. She seemed to have had a bad day in the middle of the week involving the bag that she carries around. Left it somewhere and then had a great outpouring of cat words. If she just wore a collar and was microchipped like me there’d be no problem.

One evening we went to the house with the Man and the Cat to give the Cat tea because the Man wasn't there. MBNAD woman rummaged around in a cupboard and got out some ambrosian cat food. No Cat. Where is she Mossie? I could have told her - upstairs locked in a bedroom. But it must have just slipped my mind.

Anyway, once the cat word day and cat in a bedroom day were out of the way, I settled down to work out if the weekend would be a Here or There weekend. Here (although, if we’re There does There become Here?).

I’ll get to the puzzle in a minute. Saturday she did all that busy stuff involving wall-string-box-brush and chemicals and washing and beds. I like it better when the house smells a bit more, how shall I put it, DOG. Me too, said the voice. I used to put my ears to good use in that pursuit but she always did the de-stinking thing. I just stand and watch the whole thing, my eyes glazing over.

We went out for a nice walk to one of the fields where she can throw a ball for me. It was a cold crisp frost angel kind of day. Mainly the old white dog stays on her step in the house and doesn’t bother to come out but she likes frosty days. She showed me this grand trick. When we used to go out for walks, MBNAD woman used to throw the ball and I would run after it, catch it and chase it round a bit then take it back to her and drop it by her feet. Then we’d do it all over again until one of us had enough. Anyway, on Saturday, the voice said, Not like that. Let me tell you how it goes. So MBNAD woman throws the ball, I run up to it and point with my nose to show her where it is and wait for her to run across to collect it. Then we do it all over again. No need to go to the gym with all that running around. “Stop teaching him bad ways!” she shouts. Not actually bad ways, I think but maybe the sort of thing you just assume if you're a princess.

Nearly at the puzzle. So we get to my afternoon walk and I think we’re going to settle down in the warm. Not likely. “C’mon, Mossie. In the kitchen.” What? Can’t be going to work on a Saturday evening. I don’t think she does that kind of work. “I’ll have a nice treat when I get back – you wait and see”. Bah.
Curl up and sleep. Yes, I had my dinner to keep me busy for about 38 seconds, then I may have just dozed off when the door opened and in came the Tall One. “You see, I told you I had a nice treat for you”. Oh yes, oh yes.

Here’s the puzzle. Where did she go to get him? If she went to get him from the railway, then I must have been asleep longer than I thought because the railway place is nearly There. But before, she went to get him from the house with the Cat and the Man and that's nearly Here. This time she says she went to London. Not sure whether that's Here or There. So where does he go? Maybe there’s a secret passage between these places. Perhaps someone could help me out.

So yesterday, we went out for a walk with the Tall One and I showed him the new ball trick. He thought it was really funny. We went around the pond on the old white dog’s special walk. I don’t have a problem with the Pooh Sticks Bridge any more and once we were over it I really got into my stride and got a good trot going. “Mossie, Stop! Stop ! Stop!” yelled the MBNAD woman. But I was in the groove so just kept going. The Tall One started to canter after me but I was well ahead. Then she did the strangest thing. She stopped and shouted “Bella, just tell him to stop at that post!”.



Stop at the post and wait for her, said the voice. Do it NOW. Wait and you go back on the lead and then she gives you a treat and you cross the road. DON’T run into the road, because you’d be squashed and believe me, the Venision Centre don’t sell collie burgers.

So, I did what she said and the MBNAD woman and the Tall One trotted up and did the whole lead/ treat thing. But how did she know to tell the old white dog? Because I always wait on the Pooh Sticks Bridge for her, said the voice. Oh. Think that she may be a witch after all.

We went visiting to see the Cat and the Man. The Cat took one look at me and said, right you, you Collie. I was upstairs waiting for my tea the other night and you just ignored me. I’m off through that catflap and you make sure you leave it alone. I stuck my head through it and the Cat was the other side saying some words. When she came to Catflap Cottage, there’s an old cupboard in the sitting room that she climbed into. She spent quite a lot of Christmas curled up in there. When I put my nose in through the door she screamed abuse at me. On the whole she seemed to like being in there and I thought that cat-in-a-cupboard seemed like a good idea. The Man has got a cupboard very like the one in Catflap Cottage so perhaps the Cat could climb in there if the Man just left the door open a bit. Perhaps you could shut the door once she's in there and then she could cuss to her heart's delight.

“Night night Mossie, night night Bella”.

And now the Tall One’s gone. She magicked him away again.

Paradise Lost

The last few days in this other Eden were spent curled up by her feet or snuggled on my blanket in the car. The lovely lady with soft gentle ear stroker hands spent ages on my soft silky ears. I could keep her in one place for hours. We went to see more of the countryside and even more of those bad birds. In fact they were swooping right over us, red kite and buzzards. I'm glad I'm a bit bigger than a rabbit. You're a big fat colliewobble, exclaims the voice. It would have to be the size of a light aircraft to get you off the ground. I take that a bit personal. I've always been a lithe specimen. Yes, since moving in with MBNAD woman, I may have filled out a bit but that's no reason to use the f word.

On the last day, she was horribly busy with the wall-string-box-brush. Burnham Wood was taken down and the wall-string-twinkles put away. She had wall-string-twinkles in the room with the catflaps. If a large bird masquerading as light aircraft was looking to hook a Mossie, she had it lit up like a landing strip ready.

Everything tidied, washing done in a water-box-wall-string, beds made. One last walk where the red kite fly. Goodbye to the lady with the Dog-with-Leanings and Toothless Cat.

I have a secret. While in Paradise, I learnt to smile. Just a little one every now and then. Mainly when we have had a nice walk and I've had a good tea. I lie out on my bed, stretch out and go to sleep and as I drift off, I find my mouth has turned into a little smiley thing. Stretching out to go to sleep is funny too. I used to curl up and keep my nose and legs tucked up for safety but now I know I'm safe. Even when the Cat was around. I think she mainly swears. Don't bank on that one, says the voice.



So, through Eden we took our solitarie way back to the other house. I know what it all means now. Sometimes here, sometimes there. And you're supposed to be the smartest of dogs, says the voice. Here and there don't ever matter. It's who you're with that counts.

Lots of people have come and gone but it's always MBNAD woman and Mossie. I know what this is : we're an item!

"Night night Mossie, night night Bella".

As good as it gets

More washing and bedmaking and then off to meet someone else who's coming to stay. On the way we go to the Dead Deer and Big Bird shop. Can't wait to see what she gets this time. Big lump of dead cow! She's very inventive on the dead animal front but in my opinion it would taste just as good put in front of you without all those vegetables and herbs. I put my nose in the basket just to get a good sniff but she hauls my nose out. "Not for you Mossie". But dreaming is good. Yes it is, says the voice, but small amounts of thieving are even better. Let me tell you about the day I stole a bagel.



You just have to learn what you can get away with, she says. Legs of lamb, not good so I suspect that the lump of dead cow might be a little bit difficult, she advises. Little and often, maybe.

We go to the place to meet the big car that runs on its own tracks. Perhaps it's the Tall One. Yes, yes... no. This is another lady, small and gentle who I think may be a good bet on the stroking front.

And she is. I can get her to spend ages stroking my ears. Till my eyes glaze over and I am asleep standing up. And we go out in the car and they are very impressed by the big bad birds again and scenery. Personally, I just don't get it. Mountains, trees, rivers, sky. Gets them all of an oooh. To me, it's just quiet or noisy scenery and wet or dry scenery. Preference is for quiet and dry.

Back to sit in front of the fire, ears stroked by soft kind hands.
How good is this.

Kung Fu Mossie

Lots of walks and hugs. Yesterday the Lady who came on Christmas Eve came to visit and we went out walking and then she was back for tea. Oooh, it was so nice. MBNAD woman and the Lady both stroking my ears. They didn't even mind when I snored.
Today shopping and tidying and then at lunch time, horror ; the dog that scared me came to visit. Bolshie Brucie. Here. He brought some nice people but I would have been happy if they had come on their own. He played with my toys and tried to get in my bed. I slunk behind the settee, ears back and head down. Then I managed to creep onto the cushions that she has put down for me in the sitting room. Still Bolshie Brucie came and nagged at me. Woofing and jumping around. I look at MBNAD woman and Brucie's woman and they are telling me that it's ok. Well I've got news for them: it's NOT ok. He was bouncing all over the place right in front of my nose. I used to just tell him to button it, said the voice, you could try it too. I just pulled one jowl back and made a very small grrrring noise. He jumped backwards and although he carried on woofing, he didn't try to get in my space again. And they said I was a good boy. Grrr. But just a little one. He's only a little Brucie even if he does think he's Bouncy Bruce Lee.
And then we went for a walk past the shouty sheepdogs to where the red kite live but the little girl got very cold so we came home for tea and Bolshie fell asleep.

A cup of kindness

Ok, the voice was right. The beds did fill up and we had loads of people here and all of them fussed over me. We had lovely walks in the mountains and then they all cooked and drank and washed up and cooked and drank and washed up some more. I missed the Litter and I think that MBNAD woman did too but she had lots of fun with the people and laughed and laughed and laughed. I like her being happy.
Last night even more people came and brought a really big dog too with a long waggity tail that hurts when it waggits against you. Ooof. All the beds filled up and she even got some other beds outs of the cupboard.
"Nearly the end of the year, Mossie." she says "What a lot of changes for you in 2007." What does end of the year mean. I know about seasons and when it's lambing and market time, but what happens at the end of the year? Does the year get rolled up and put away? Does it all start again?
All the females put on different clothes and smells and paint. I don't know why they do that but they seem to spend a lot of time fussing about clothes and smells and paint. I like it best when she puts on old jeans and her sheep coat. But I suppose she did look nice in that dressed up sort of way. Also apparently it's rude to call the females bitches. Dunno why but I don't want to get picked up on manners.
They all seemed to be well settled in eating and drinking and I thought that we were getting to night night Mossie time when they all bundled out of the house leaving me. "C'mon Mossie, we're only going down to the Tanners to see in the New Year". But I can go to the Tanners. I lean on her leg and moan softly to her. No, not tonight, says the voice. I'll keep you company.
And when they got back, they were all laughing and seem to have been drinking and dancing. Oh well, they probably would have stepped on my toes since they're a lot more clumsy than me. Don't know why they don't go to agility classes since one of them fell out of bed. The word fine seemed to be the cause of a great deal of giggling too. How can bitch be rude and fine be hilarious? I feel that there is much to learn in 2008.





"Night night Mossie, night night Bella"