Socks, hygge and Elfie

Tom's Christmas leftover socks, made not from cold cuts, dry sage and onion stuffing and petrified Christmas pudding, but from the ends of sundry sweaters, bits of tapestry wool, hats and other socks. Leftovers, store cupboards and stash, the best of things.

This seems to me the kind of picture used to illustrate the concept of hygge, narrowly beaten by Brexit as the neologism of the year. While googling around, I found this Slate article, well worth reading if rather disturbing to quietist stay-at-homes like myself - 'Responding to [the events of 2016] in any meaningful way will mean dousing the log fire, leaving the house, and feeling a chill'. Also a lengthier, rather less abrasive, analysis in the Grauniad, and an amusing last word ('hygge is byllshytte') from the Daily Mash, of course. Personally I find the conviviality aspect of hygge rather offputting* but reserve the right, at this stage of the proceedings, to maintain necessary levels of warmth and comfort, and indeed, to turn inward and give up on the world sometimes as we make our sad way through this ever darkening vale of tears.

We do brace ourselves and get outside. Elfie is a perpetual delight, though she continues to behave in a decidedly non-hyggeligt manner towards many forms of wildlife, and cats. Letting her off the lead on the old rail track, she trotted along amicably with me for a bit then suddenly picked up something, probably the trace of a roe deer, and in a trice was over the drop of the wooded escarpment, a couple of metres at least though soft with undergrowth and leaf mould, and rapidly bouncing off out of sight and hearing like an orange and white springbok. I stood on the edge whistling and swearing, out loud.

'Bonjour, Lucieee' from behind me.

It was our former insurance agent, neat and poised with her dear little pedigree westie on a neat red lead at her side, a woman I truly like but who seems to have a knack of making demands on me at the wrong times.

'Oh, bonjour Simone, c'est ma vilaine qui est partie...'

'Oh yes,' with clear what-can-you-expect sympathy, 'that hunting dog you got from the SPA. Will she come back?'

'Uhm, in general she comes back. It might take a few minutes...'

She went on to regale me with the details of her daughter's career, punctuated by rather unhelpful remarks and questions ('Aren't you afraid for her? How long have you had her now?) which I tried to listen and respond to while still whistling and swearing, inwardly.

I finally shook her off, climbed a nearby bank into the wood, whistled a couple more times and a few moments later Her Predatoriness came crashing back, pushing through brambles and over branches in her eagerness to return and share her joy in her adventures with me, as always. I'm happy to say I've never poisoned such recall as she does have by showing her anything other than delight, praise, treats and much whooping on our reunion, most of which is genuine, coming from pure relief.

Yet it is a bit more than that. The love we bear one another, and a pocketful of tasty treats, won't quite stop her running away after something irresistible, but I'm beginning to think it will make her want to come back, and there's nothing like her eager wild face coming towards me, or the extra-affectionate cuddles we have the evening after one of her rasher exploits. And her acute, intense awareness and perceptions of the natural world (even if she does mostly want to chase, kill and eat it) are infectious: I never knew before in which spots in the bank the field mice lived, or in which flooded ditches the water voles had their holes, that there was a family of partridges that lived around the hamlet of le Boissy, or indeed that the roe deer sometimes graze in winter in that low lying wet paddock by the farm below Quengo or in the long fields beside the mirabelle hedge; I knew these places, of course, but not their finer, more living details, albeit prompted by my need to be one step ahead of her whenever possible. I am curious as to why blackbirds get her going and are fun to harry and stalk when they rustle around in the hedges, yet their fieldfare cousins in the open are put up in only the most lackadaisical manner, and why crows are given a wide and respectful berth, even an injured one in the middle of a field was left alone with very little calling off from me.

I am torn; I want her to express her nature and the behaviours which make her what she is, but I also need to restrain, intercept and control them, for her own safety and for the sake of the poor struggling wild creatures who are persecuted enough - when spring comes and they have their young I know I must constrain her even more. I hate the whole business, in the modern world, of humans hunting with dogs and killing for fun, I'm squeamish about dead and injured things, but I also find myself wanting to know more about why she does what she does, how much is nature and how much training, as well, of course, as wondering why someone with a dog fine-tuned to respond to pheasants, hare and partridge, and fairly indifferent to pigeons and rabbits, simply let her get lost and never reclaimed her, which we'll never know. Her buggering off isn't always rebelliousness or ignorance, I'm sure, but that she thinks that's what we want her to do, what a dog like Elfie is supposed to do when out in the countryside with her humans. Her predatory impulse towards injured and lame things (toads on the terrace get no more than a perfunctory sniff unless they are trapped and floundering in puddles in black plastic, wagtails always catch her attention because their long-tailed bobbing movement looks like the trailing flight of something damaged) is repugnant to us, but natural and in fact quite kind in hunting terms, both in man-made hunting and in nature; wounded, damaged prey needs to be pursued and finished; trainers and hunters on épagneul and American Brittany websites I've researched pride their dogs on their ability to track, tackle and bring back crippled quarry.

It seems to me I could sometimes work with her impulses, rather than confuse her with aversion. The live (though presumably not well) blackbird she dived into the leaf litter and pulled out was not killed but only shocked and winded, it fluttered off apparently undamaged when Tom took it away, probably if I hadn't panicked and shouted when she did it so that she tensed and held on to it and had to be forced to give it up it might have fared better. One day, after her nerves were jangled and her mind distracted by coming across a number of hunters and their dogs (whom she hates and reacts to with volleys of uncharacteristic barking and growling) out and about, I took her out on the terrace to brush her. When I'd finished and we turned to go in, she broke away from me, rushed over to the edge of the terrace where the birds feed, and picked up a dead sparrow, which I'd not seen but she evidently had, and brought it back to me in a perfect retrieve. Another time, running around in a pasture some way from me, she picked up something large and grisly looking; instead of running at  her shouting 'leave-it', I called and cajoled and encouraged her to bring it over, which she did, with some effort, as it proved to be an enormous, ancient thigh bone of an ox, very grubby and much chewed (lord knows what it was doing there). She was a little reluctant to give it up but with much praise and laughter and lots of treats we sealed the bargain very cheerfully so I took it from her and led her away from it.

It often seems to me a rather wonderful and mysterious thing that we have this strange, wild, golden-eyed creature in our home, lying by our fire or on our couch, eating from a tin and a packet, snuggling our feet and soaking up endless love and affection while very visibly dreaming, and enacting, her dreams of flight, pursuit,bloodshed and mayhem. A dog the like of which I haven't had before, and the source of much joy.



*As I've said before, I can do conviviality, but seldom find it reassuring or conducive to complacency.

Air frost at New Year

This is perhaps my tenth New Year post (I've not checked if I did one the first year), it's something of a custom to commit to doing one. I've always been something of a party-pooper about New Year at the best of times, often tending to a Jeremiah-ish mood, and indeed,  these are not the best of times, in many ways, and it's difficult not to feel lugubrious and apprehensive about the year(s) to come, on all kinds of levels from the personal to the global, including the intersection of the two which I feel has a more ominous reality than it has really had for me before. Likewise, on the personal and wider world spheres, this has been a year of shocks and difficulties. We have hopes and dreams of our own, beyond the shock reactions and urges to flight after the fire, which have calmed down somewhat, yet the path to get to them looks sometimes steep, fraught and uncertain.

As often I woke early after sleeping fitfully; my body and its broken thermostat and other inner chemical workings playing tricks on me I could really do without, lay with a lot of rather dreary thoughts and a few more cheerful ones, counted my blessings backwards alphabetically, (one of a number of devices not quite sovereign but sometimes useful against insomnia and anxiety), dozed a little and waited for the late, late daylight.

When it came, action, affection, tea and toast restored my spirits as they usually do, and it brought what seems to have become rare and lovely thing, as well as a heavy mist, a glorious air frost and light of pink and blue and gold, which prompted me to another rather unusual thing these days, to get the camera out,

though these were taken from the comfort and warmth of the kitchen:

But Elfie and I were eager to get out and get sniffing and looking:

The mist came and went and shrunk the world as it does, so the road out of our village disappeared into oblivion:

But this is the weather that Elfie likes, and so do I:

In the frequent fog we've had I've been nervous about letting her off the lead, as her usual running distance would take her out of sight, but on this occasion I did, and she always kept in sight, and seemed to love the crispness underfoot and good smells.

The frost continued to form as we were out, making fine filaments in the fur round her ears,

and at one point I put my hand to my own hair and found it stiff with ice too, yet it turned to wet as soon as we got indoors again, rushing in, in vain, to show Tom the phenomenon.

Many wonderful things have happened to us this year too, as I'm sure they have everywhere. Tonight it will be guinea fowl pie, the last of Christmas dinner, and a dvd, and I imagine we'll be in bed and asleep before midnight.

Happy New Year.

Christmas Day in the evening

The rather jaded stage. But it's been a perfectly good one, as it usually is.

Quiet, of course. We've got the card sending, and commensurate receiving, down to about half what it once was (I don't quite know how, only a few people on the list have actually departed this life), but, lazy and phone averse as I am, I actually picked up the device and made a couple of calls, and received a couple more and felt happy to connect with the people on the other end in all cases.

In my somewhat frenzied bonfire of the vanities back on the summer, I threw out all of our Christmas decorations (except maybe I kept a small painted bell K sent us one year, if so but I can't remember where I put it). This is something I find I don't regret at all, we didn't have many but they had become a rather scruffy and slightly disheartening obligation. I strung up the cards we did receive, and bought a bundle of pretty red hand made candles when in England, we roasted a pintade and various stuffing-type things, including the the last packet of chipolatas from the freezer, and there was still a Christmas pud in the cupboard from last year, and we were festive enough.

I got a pair of socks for Tom finished in time, and best of all, it being Elfie's first Christmas with us, she was made much of, with very classy new piece of kit, a Julius K9 Powerharness in silver, no less. Nothing but the best for our girl:

We've always had a harness for her for walking and travelling; we brought an SPA one, with their logo on it, back with her from the refuge. It was quite well-designed but I always felt it gave her rather too much of the look of a charity child.

The legend 'best friend' was an optional extra, you can order velcro-on labels to go over the brand ones, they glow in the dark. We had to choose from a list, so we went for that on one side, and 'treat monster' on the other:

She also had a juicy bone, which I imagine was her preferred present, though she seemed happy to go out in the harness.

Happy Christmas all.

Elfin Friday - through a bone, hopefully

She does love a bone. This one brought back from the supermarket, one of two in a pack, a couple of weeks ago at least. The meat attaching and the marrow within were made to disappear within an hour at most, but the bone really has gone on and on, we still often hear gnawing sounds coming from her corner, though there's nothing left on it at all. The other one is in the freezer still, for a rainy day.

You can take it off her though, no argument. Such a good dog.

Ten good things today

I fulfil my pledge to clear three barrow loads of hedge cuttings before lunch, and get rid of a handful of nasty brambles into the bargain, with only minimal scratching for my pains.

Last night's baroque concert turned out not to be really a concert at all, but an excruciating, facetious kind of 'educational' programme about the court of Louis XIV, with about ten minutes of talk to every two of music, though the musicians, clavichord, viola de gamba player and singer, were good. Dutch E, her friend S and I slip away early. It was disappointing not to have enjoyed good music, and I do so enjoy the viola de gamba, but so nice to be home having listened to our inclinations rather than timidity and need to be polite. The relief is still with me today.

I don't get to Quessquitricote because my car is in the garage, having expensively failed its controle technique (two-yearly roadworthiness test). Neither of these thing is good news, but with the aforesaid virtuous garden chores, I feel I am justified in spending time this afternoon knitting.

It rains more and more on our afternoon walk. Elfie is the same colour as the autumn leaves and bracken - or her russet-orange bits are anyway - and snuffs the wind and rain with gusto and runs off-leash for much of the way without buggering off once.

Started some mittens with the leftovers of the Icelandic wool (out of which I made this sweater). It's more purple and red than the picture shows. Adding Latvian braids to them. I love Latvian braids. I love Icelandic wool.

Smell of wet dog.

Glass of rosé.

Japanese rice crackers. With one in one hand and the SD card in the other, I narrowly avoid putting the latter in my mouth instead of the former.

The rain and wind is coming from the north, for a change. This makes it cold, and noisy on the bedroom skylight, but means it will not blow in under the doors and windows.

Pork chops and pink onions.

Elfin Friday: keep them doggies rolling

Pick it up

chew it up

Chew it up

Spit it out

Pick it up

Chew it up,

Rawhide!

~

Such a joy to have a dog who takes anything good to chew or eat without fuss, but with glee and appreciation, who doesn't guard or control or toy with but concentrates on and finishes things. One of the benefits of a harder life before perhaps. Yet I could take it out of her mouth without any argument if need be, even though that mouth is full of carpet knives, and she totally looks like a wild beast while she's chewing it.

Our friendly, big-guy gardener who comes to cut the hedges, about whom she gave a rare, deep, warning bark when he loomed up at the French doors, came in and made a great fuss of her, let her jump up, cuddled her and slapped her ribs and told her how beautiful she was, all much to her delight, though she didn't get silly and came over to us for affirmation straight away. Then he started teasing a bit by saying ' où sont les lapins, où est le chat?', and at the word 'chat' she immediately became agitated, looking up at the window and tensing her body. So someone has clearly encouraged anxiety, chasing and predatory behaviour towards cats, which makes it more of a problem to overcome. Similarly when Susie, her trainer, got out a long thin stick to show how she might learn 'touch it' training, such as assistance dogs learn, Elfie perceptibly flinched and ducked. Which makes it all the more remarkable and touching that she is, in general, such a brave, cheerful, adaptable and affectionate dog.

Elfin Friday - socks

She likes our feet, she seems to regard them as puppies in need of cuddling, washing if bare (right in between the toes, an ordeal for the ticklish) and generally grooming. The socks Tom is wearing in the picutre above have seen better days, but they're quite a popular pair so I darned them with some blueish print sock yarn, as you may just see, part of my personal visible mending project. However, as you can also see, they continue to pill, and yesterday Elfie was assiduously nibbling at and pulling off the pills, spitting them out rather as she does goose grass and other seeds in her own fur.

Funny dog.

Elfin Friday

Inspired by my good friend Soize's occasional series featuring her fabulous boxer dog 'C'est lundi, c'est Gauffrette', another (nearly) alliterative prompt to make for a quick and easy post every week; I shall aim, each Friday, to post a picture or pictures here of our darling Elfie.

Elfie went for her first off-leash walk on the beach yesterday, or the tidal flats of the bay of St Brieuc rather. I have no photos of this because I didn't take the camera and anyway was too busy trying to forestall her chasing the horses and sulky carts, fairly successfully, and terrorising the wildlife, less successfully. There wasn't very much of the latter at low tide in November, and for quite a while cheese was more attractive than birds, but on the second passing of a couple of foraging egrets in a tidal pool in the far distance she couldn't help herself, and became a deaf and faraway dot for several minutes while the egrets flapped and squawked around her head. Not the most relaxing walk really, but long and bracing and she didn't half get a good tiring run out of it. She returned to the car filthy, bedraggled and smelling like a not very nice rock pool, and I expected to have to wash her down before letting her into the house, but half an hour on a thick fleece blanket in the back of the car and she emerged clean as a whistle. Her coat is remarkable like that, soft and silky but very resilient and low maintenance, shrugs off dirt and moisture, and hardly ever knots or tangles. Sheds like mad, mind, fine stuff. After fourteen years of collecting dark clothing that wouldn't show Molly's black hair, I suppose I'll now have to change my wardrobe for cream, beige and ginger shades. Lovely.

Here's a picture of her enjoying a patch of sun. We do love her.

Easing back in.

Look, no lead.

A step forward which has really only just taken place in the last couple of weeks. The progress has very largely been on my part, letting go of the fear and the need for control, trusting her. I've a few photos showing this state of affairs, most of them not very clear because of the rapid movement of the subject, but it's cheering to note that in all of them she's coming towards me. Not that that's always the case; fairly often I'm having to keep myself calm, steady and fairly quiet, only calling out an occasional 'Elfie, this way', while continuing on my own path, rather than shouting pointless recall commands and chasing after her, while she disappears into the depths of a maize field or bramble thicket or describes a wild, wide arc across an acre of open stubble or round a herd of cows, telling myself that she knows where I am and will of course return to me in a few moments with a puffing grin and an expectation of a click and a treat, which she does.

One of many exercises in detachment I've been practising, though I think perhaps some of it is more a case of having detachment thrust upon one than of purposely achieving it. We've done a tremendous amount of shedding.

Back in the gîte in Plémy again where we were in July, until the end of September, with internet and a dishwasher (the latter a joy hitherto unknown to us, believe it or not), and happy to be here. The final expert's report has gone through but the house won't be finished when we have to move back in; the painters and decorators can't do their job till the staircase carpenter has done his, and he can't start till the electrician has finished, and he's only just started... In spite of this, everyone wants deposits and the insurance company, though they have really been very good, still haven't sent us the cheque to cover these. We're OK, but it would be harder for someone who had lost more and had less of a financial cushion than we have. But still, all will be well, the cheque is in the post (as they say) and we count our blessings as always. A few minutes of sheer terror, a few hours of misery, worry and discomfort, a few days of shock, and then really rather a good summer, rootlessness and lightness of being, reflection and recouping, not bad at all. We'll be able to camp out comfortably enough, we've know worse.

I'll leave it at that for the moment, but this is one thing I don't want to shed, though snail mail letters and brown paper packages have their charms! Back soon, with more of Elfie if nothing else.

Freedom of the Garden. Tom's doing; I went out leaving strict instructions not to let her our etc etc which he ignored and she's been enjoying freedom with responsibility ever since.

Aftermath moments

The assessor looked at our stocks of good wine, in polystyrene racks at the back of the cupboard where the fire started, and shook his head. When the cleaning team, Natalie and a young chap called, rather delightfully, Valerian, started emptying that cupboard and lining the bottles up outside, they looked remarkably unscathed, as indeed was the polystyrene around them, which must have protected them from the heat and smoke, most of which went up, and the soot which came down. The thought of our little caches of Pouilly-Fumé and St Emilion, the couple of egregrious New Zealand Semillons found by chance, the vieilles vignes Alsace Gewurztraminers, the little slim bottle of Tokaji, the odd ones of Savennières, Loupiac and Cremant de Limoux, all disappearing, literally, down the drain, breaks my heart, even if we did get the monetary value of them back, and we decide we can but try. A quick wipe across the top of the capsule with one of Natalie's magic sponges, and we are happily able to establish later that they are indeed none the worst, at a belated 4th July barbecue (our hosts were hesitant about this form of cooking for us, and lit it quite a way off, but in fact it was fine). Now the bottles seem to us like like lost sinners that repenteth, to be welcomed back with an extravagance that outweighs their apparent worth, or like the images of saints or other holy things which are fêted and worshipped for their miraculous emergence out of earthquake, fire and flood. We celebrate their survival, and ours, by giving them away like there's no tomorrow, which there might not have been.

Natural materials, except for cotton which absorbs everything, seem to shrug off the smoke and soot and general pollution much better, so our leather shoes which were right by the fire are surprisingly untainted, wooden, wicker and and even sea grass items are easy to put to rights, and my knitting, of wool and alpaca, once hung on the line in the sun and air, is none the worse. Natural things are still breathing, says Natalie.

Elfie starts shaking her head. I feel guilty about the rather wild and over-excited walks we've been having in barley fields and such like, and call Emmy the vet, who says we shouldn't delay, so we leave Natalie and Valerian to it and drive over to her. Emmy fears a grass seed and knocks Elfie out, only to find nothing but a bit of inflammation and a stray hair or two. The three of us cosy down in a clean cage, periodically annoyed by Gina and Mimine and a tortoiseshell Persian cat, while Elfie comes round. In the spirit of the truism, if you want something done, ask a busy person, I take this, and the subsequent flat battery in my car, pretty much in my stride. Elfie acts a bit drunk for the evening but is fine next day, and very easy going about having her ear squirted, though I must say it was something I was hoping not to have to do with a dog again.

'Make yourself at home, Elfie' says the Quiet American, as she gulps down their cat's milk on the way through the kitchen, before even looking at the meat and biscuits. 'It's got no lactose' the German Doctor, 'it's better for them'. We never knew she liked milk, and while she's getting anaesthetised Tom goes shopping and buys a couple of bottles of the lactose-free stuff with Emmy's approval. Now she has a measure of it with both breakfast and dinner, and will eagerly leave her meat and biscuits to lap it up, which pleases us very much, especially as I feel she doesn't really drink enough generally.

We like the sound of the church clock, and the sight of the steeple. Plémy church has never seemed very picturesque, its body being too big for its roof, but from here its proportions seem better. We also like the swifts, a feature of urban life, and I quite like meeting with a happy crowd spilling out of the tiny bar during the France-Germany match on our evening stroll, and being able to walk just round the corner to the garage to get the car battery sorted out.

We sometimes feel like ghosts. Partly because of that weird inkling, beloved of writers of ghost stories, that perhaps we really did die and didn't know it, and are continuing in a kind of parallel existence which will dwindle into evanescence, but also because the episode has jolted us into a next stage, so we have essentially moved on in our minds, yet are hanging around the periphery of our former life and its locations without quite being there.

The good, the bad and the ugly; living in a boarding kennel

That's my excuse for my dilatoriness around here. When we saw, fell in love with, and took home Elfie, it completely slipped my mind that I had already agreed to look after Bunty and Pepette. I had never been exactly overwhelmed with enthusiasm for the idea, but their owners, neighbours two fields away and nice enough people, whom I've known as nodding and dog-conversational acquaintances for ever, had been offered the gift of a trip to Corsica, and we being dogless thought, 'why not?' when they asked us the favour.

So now we find ourselves stranded in a boarding kennel with the good:

the bad:

and the ugly:

Pèpette, the miniature Yorkie weighs in at just over a kilo, with an ego the size of a city-state, and never bloody keeps still.

She can't see a human, any human, without jumping up its legs like a demented hairy shrimp on speed. She needs to be combed fairly frequently - her fur reminds me of my grandmother's hair

which rather creeps me out - and her top-knot re-fastened. When she came it had a little pink bow hair-slide in it, but that soon came off. I pretended to put it on Elfie's head and she tried to eat it.

So far she hasn't tried to eat Pèpette.

Indeed, she is patience and saintliness itself with her, rolling over placidly and allowing her to molest her, and generally accepting the invasion of her personal space and appropriation of her own humans with perfect grace, but the little monster really does provoke her sometimes, and I take nothing for granted. Apart from the difference between Elfie's 18 kilos and Pèpette's 1200 grammes, which causes me to fear that a well-meant play-bow or enthusiastic bound might end in injury, Elfie still has her wild-child, once-a-hunting-dog-always-a-hunting-dog tendencies (the vole she pulled out of a tuft of grass, its little pink legs sticking quaintly out of each corner of her mouth, was finished stone dead in an instant, then deposited meekly at my feet), and what I like to think of as her St Julian the Hospitaller moments (never without a twinge of missing Joe for a shared allusion). A little learning of dog behaviourism has made me (perhaps) dangerously fearful of the phenomenon of predatory drift, and Elfie can be a bit mouthy when she's excited.

The ugly one is Bunty. He's a boy. His owner told us he was often surnommé Boubou, but we feel even sillier calling him that, and as he really doesn't seem to respond to any call or command anyway it doesn't much matter, so we just call him Fatty (Pèpette being Ratty), or the Ewok.

((Now don't give me that po-faced, genre-snobbery, 'of course I've never seen it' stuff, I'm a post-modern gal and it's not all about the lesser known fiction of Flaubert you know.)

The good thing about saying horrible things to dogs is as long as you do so nicely they won't grow up psychologically damaged, bitter and twisted by it. Unless that's what's happened to Bunty already; he's about twelve and decidedly eccentric, but in fact he's not really much trouble; 

Elfie accepts him with what I anthropomorphically interpret as amused tolerance,

and he is polite enough to her, and apart from sometimes barking at passing cars and other noises and guarding his food (there's quite a bit of disordered controlling behaviour around food that goes on with both of them, and I won't be having it), deformed jaw, bad breath and noisy panting, he's not a bad chap.

The owners are giving us some money for it but however much it is it's not enough, or so we keep saying, firm in our resolve to be clear that we will not do it again other than in the direst of emergencies. In truth though, we are rather enjoying ourselves; it's helped that Jantien, who is endlessly cheerful and energetic and often up for an evening walk or an occasional dog-sit, has been staying again.

It's a bind, it's true, we can't really go out much or think of having people around, Elfie's training is going rather by the board (we were mightily relieved when her trainer cancelled because the training room was flooded after the recent  storm, despite being sorry for her misfortune, since we really hadn't done enough homework) and the round of walks, feeds, separating, supervision, socialising and cleaning up seems to take a huge amount of time and leave little for much else, for we are exceptionally conscientious and hard-working dog-minders, I think. It's certainly clarified for us that we only intend to ever be a one-dog household.

However, we really are laughing a lot, at the sheer ridiculousness of the two visitors and at the humour we can find in the situations arising: Tom in a state of hilarity at the window the first time watching me go out with the three of them ('You looked like Ben Hur'),

or the improvised play-pen in the living room which he had quickly and deftly set up with garden fencing to keep the Yorkie out of Elfie's face, and ours.

And while I still think it's very wrong to breed dogs to physical extremes of size, skull deformity etc for human vanity and whimsy, so a dog like Pèpette really can't live safely and comfortably with the doggy impulses and behaviours she retains, and others like Bunty are rendered brain-damaged and breathless, we do, in spite of ourselves, find we're enjoying their characters, admiring her pluck and amused by his quaintness. We end up picking her up and keeping her on her laps to keep tabs on her and settle her down, since it seems hard to pen her up all the time, and I frequently hear indulgent noises and spluttering laughter coming from Tom's end of the room as she makes much of him. She is bright and attentive, and can walk tirelessly, still racing around the place after a long walk which leaves the others stretched-out and panting.

They are also also making us very appreciative of Elfie, of her beauty and naturalness, her good character and quietness, even her moments of wild and dangerous grace, and we very much look forward to being back to just the three of us again and the things we can do together. Although, Jantien having driven off for Cherbourg and England this morning we feel strangely bereft, we've grown very used to having her around, few visitors fit in with so little effort on all sides. She assures us she will be back, which will be nice.

Meanwhile, just ten more days of pack life to go; I think they're having rather a good holiday, at the end of it we'll need one.