Another sunny day. We’ll be growing accustomed to this.
Word of the day, courtesy of a friend, a retired teacher of English:
Spuddle - 17th century word meaning to work ineffectively:to be extremely busy all day and achieve absolutly nothing.
I just spent twenty minutes or so talking to one of the neighbours in the garden, swapping notes on what we have or have not done in the last few days. We agreed that both of us “spuddle” quite a lot these days.
As yet another Conservative MP defects to Labour, here’s one of Michael Rosen’s Boris “tweets’:
Dear Mogg
My mind turns to the possibility that I might defecate to Labour myself. Why not? I'm sure young Starmer would find me a safe spot in some god forlorn safe Labour constituency full of horny handed songs of toil. Once more unto the beach, Moggo
Pist oppo tunist
Boris
It does rather seem that Keir Starmer is ejecting socialists from the party and replacing them with disgruntled Tories. Maybe he is hoping that disgruntled voters who have “always” voted conservative will switch their allegiance when the general election comes around. We shall see!
When I was very small, just a toddler, I managed to have whooping cough and diphtheria both at the same time. It was the sort of thing that happened to small children back then, end of the 1940s, beginning of the 1950s. The family story goes that my grandmother saved my life on more than one occasion during that illness, doing goodness knows what to make sure I kept on breathing. Now I read that babies are dying again from whooping cough. There has been an increase in cases over the last few years, as there has been with measles, which used to be one of those childhood illnesses that we just accepted in my childhood but which we thought we had eradicated in the modern age. But we’ve grown complacent and the vaccination refusers have let these diseases creep back in. Strange times!
Granddaughter Number One, as I may have mentioned on more than one occasion before now, has a whole menagerie of pets: dog, cat, tortoise, bearded dragon, axolotl, gecko - maybe even more exotica! Who knows? She could probably supplement her income by turning her house into a petting zoo.
Somehow it seems logical that a young woman with a range of anxiety and depression problems, not to mention physical problems with joints and arthritis, would have a dog that suffers from anxiety (or maybe just reflects her owner’s anxiety problems, picking up moods in the way that dogs can do!) and has some physical problems as well. Over the last few years she has cost Granddaughter Number One (and occasionally me as I am the one she turns to in financial emergency) quite a lot of money in vets’ fees.
On top of some quite substantial outlay to investigate why the dog is underweight (actually, really skinny, something she hides under her furry coat, rather like an anorexic teenager hiding her skinniness under big fluffy jumpers) there has recently been the question routine injections against worms and other such doggy stuff. Before the vet would consider administering injections, they wanted her to have a general check-up - for a fee of course - despite having had one only recently. Oh, and they recommend a complete doggy body scan to investigate her weight loss - only several hundred pounds!
Here’s a link to an article about that very thing. There seems to be a sort of vet-cartel scam, where older independent vets are bought up by a bigger company who then charge extortionate amounts of money for treatments your pet may not need.
Another reason not to have a dog!
It’s quite enough to find that the dog next door has left a smelly calling card in our grass!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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