The Other Dog

On Sunday, my Dad Skyped me to say that The Other Dog was suddenly very much worse than before. On Sunday night, the vet rang to say that the kindest thing would be to put him out of his misery. My parents waited until their usual vet came in on Monday morning and by the afternoon it was all over and The Other Dog had slipped away to raid the Big Kitchen Bin in the Sky.

The Big Kitchen Bin in the Sky is a great place for dogs like The Other Dog. In this happy place, it is permanently lunchtime and there are always builders sitting outside the house, eating sandwiches. It is a place where children eat biscuits and drop A Lot of crumbs. This place has a big back garden with plenty of gaps in the fence to escape through. The kitchen door is never shut and dustbins have ill-fitting lids which are never quite securely on. For a dog that likes to lie in wait under the breakfast table, a real treat is in store: no-one ever wears slippers in the morning and deliciously cheesy feet poke in under the tablecloth. Nobody complains or squeals when a warm, slobbery doggy tongue slurps between their toes. The Postman visits four times a day.

The words 'No', 'Sit!', 'Drop it!' and 'Diet' do not exist there.

He was a very lovely, friendly dog and good with children and elderly people (coincidentally also the two demographic groups most likely to spill food). With the rest of us, he was a grumpy git who stole other people's sandwiches and hid behind the sofa at the sound of the word 'walkies' after dusk, but still we loved him lots and we miss him terribly.

Sto lat!

On 29 November, 1909, my Granny was born in a small mining town in North Wales.
One hundred years ago and an entirely different universe, she was fourth in a family of six: four sisters and a brother. Their mother died while she was still a child and their father was injured in a mining accident and left unable to work. The two littlest girls were fostered by other families in the village while the others stayed behind and were looked after by the eldest daughter, a slight thirteen-year old.
Her childhood was spent in a culture wholly different to that of my own: milk was a precious commodity, English was a foreign language learnt at school and leeks were pinned to fronts on St David's Day*.
At the age of fifteen, after finishing school, my grandmother and one of her elder sisters moved to the foreign lands of darkest Tunbridge Wells to go into service at a maternity hospital.
(Several years ago, after I ran away - desperately unhappy - from an awful summer job working as a live-in barmaid at an Italian hotel, she looked at me knowingly: I knew you wouldn't like it, she said, it's hard, I know that. I was twenty-one though and it was only a summer job.)

It's hard to imagine one hundred years: as a young girl growing up in Wales, could she ever have dreamed up television, aeroplanes, the internet, whole symphony orchestras stored on a pen drive and instant communication with family living halfway across the globe? Of miraculous drugs that might have saved her mother, her husband? What if I live to be one hundred? What unimaginable wonders will humanity have produced by then? How fast will the time fly by?

Happy birthday Granny (for yesterday) - here's to the next one.






*Although I suspect that she may be having us on about this one.