Emergencies, fermentation, and the Pursuit of Good Hearing

Whit a scunner. One day of sunshine at a time lest we get too used to such frivolity.

With the frost fully gone, I relaxed and got lulled into a careless footstep. I slipped on a rock and in a semi controlled fall I bumped my right shin, hip and shoulder and mildly tweaked my left hamstring. As I lay on the ground resisting the urge to burst into tears I did tick off a couple of things to be grateful for. . I hadn’t pee’d myself and I wasn’t wearing any of Spooks rescue ‘equipment’. He thinks I endanger the lives of others when I divert his good waterproofs for my own ends. I WAS wearing his socks but how many socks can a man wear? His suggestion that I am putting lives at risk by wearing his socks is wearing thin (like his socks.) Anyway - the sun was shining for a change so at least I had a nice blue sky to look up at.

Even the dog doesn’t want to go out on wet days. Sniffs and poops is what it’s all about but he can cope with short walks in emergencies. Such as the one which occurred last week. Running Girl phoned in a state of some distress. I couldn’t work out the gibberish but reckoned I was only 10 minutes away from where she was working, and where I’d just started the dog walk. I could be there with sweet buns within 15 mins The dog was bundled into the car, buns were bought, and we delivered to the rescue team building where she was whipping the place into a quite stunning level of order. Sadly, the announcement that Ken Bruce is to retire from Radio 2 had put her into meltdown mode which only tea and sweet treats can get her out of. Thankfully she’d got the biscuit cupboard in order before the terrible news so all was not lost and with my bun intervention the biscuits remained intact for the team as they would have been her emotional back up plan.

This is the kind of order I’m expected to maintain (and a very important aspect of rescues) when she’s off on her 3 month cycle tour in the spring, so when a member of the team came in (the one who pays the cleaner) and asked for my car keys so he could move my car to a better space, I couldn’t let him discover the real me. I’m a shockingly messy person and I didn’t want him judging me by the state of my car. Also, when I’d got back in the car after buying the buns I could smell rotting cabbage. This could either be a damp cloth lurking under a seat and festering for a few days or could have been my home made sauerkraut, some of which had escaped from my sandwich when I was lunching between jobs last week. I’d told myself I needed to get that cleaned up before Spook found it but by the time I got home I’d completely forgotten about it. Sometimes even I struggle to live with myself, and the sudden bad smell was surpassing my own personal limit.

The smell was even worse when I went to move the car but I’d forgotten I’d popped the dogs poo bag into the car in the rush and so in this instance, it wasn’t stinking cloths or loose sauerkraut. However, I continue to live on the edge with Spook, between wearing his clothes and not looking after his car. When he was fixing a hand brake cable yesterday and was rooting about in the boot he said there appeared to be about a gallon of olive oil or something similar which had leaked down into the spare wheel fixings.

Ah. Yes. I could explain that I was transporting a small jar of olive oil to his parents house where we were all dosing our ears to improve our hearing and I couldn’t find a lid. I’d put cling film and an elastic band around the top and it would appear this had not stopped leakage when the jar had fallen over. I tried to look angelic as I was, after all, helping his mum and dad - whilst hoping that this was distracting from the far more offensive fermenting cabbage in the front foot well. He was unsympathetic however and wondered that there was any oil left for anyone’s ears.

The other good news was that my sister could tell me that Ken was still going to be around but on a different radio station and that Pop Master would continue to sustain Running Girl through her cleaning mornings.