Short of weapons in a battle of wits

29 July, 2013 (11:16) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

What bothers me is this: in a battle of wits, how is it I’m losing to a creature clearly not in possession of even half the requisite amount?

To call my crazed collie a half-wit would be not only politically incorrect, but also wildly inaccurate. She would have made the perfect pet for President George W Bush: she too has ideas far, far above her station that she is not intellectually equipped to enact. (Though unlike him, she is not easily led).

My boys are very fond of Cressida Cowell’s How To Train a Dragon books, brilliant adventures set in a medieval world shared by Vikings and their dragons. The books contain a sort of English-Dragon language translation dictionary, and therein a dog is brilliantly defined as, in Dragonese, a ‘dimwoof’. My boys have now changed Belle the mad collie’s name to Dimwoof. It suits her admirably.

I have to love her, of course, for she is my dog; but boy, I wish she was easier to love.

She spends much of her time outside, for that is where she prefers to be. We have a large garden, and she patrols it. She has a round. First she checks the lane, barking as required at any passers-by. This has annoyed horse-riders with horses who are upset by barking dogs, though a horse that is upset by a barking dog is possibly the only creature in the universe more stupid than my dog.

Then she checks our field, reserving barking, leaping, spinning and other spectacles for our resident horses if they are near her. If cows are in the next field, she stands up against the garden fence, to make it easier for them to see her, and gives them a bark too. Then she checks the field on the other side of the road for cows and / or dog walkers. Then, exhausted, she has a lie-down in the sun, if present, or one of her inside dens – shed, polytunnel, log store – if wet. Then she starts all over again. Not forgetting chasing the cat.

What has sparked the battle of wits is that she is so fascinated by the world she patrols that she wants to get into it. She is forever working out fresh ways to scale the five-foot garden gate and its accompanying brief length of timber fence, part of her security arrangements. This means she is able to give close, personal attention to the cars in the lane, the horses in the field and the neighbouring cows, and is unacceptable to all concerned. Particularly me.

So I am trying to outwit her. The chink in her doggy armour is that, being a collie, if she is called she will come. So I stand on my side of the gate and fence and call her, and she reveals her latest escape route immediately by springing to my side. She then looks back, looks up at me and utters the doggy equivalent of “Bugger!” Every time.

Therefore I have addressed:

Piles of bricks left nearby used as climbing aids.

A faulty latch, too easily pushed open.

A weak panel secured to the hedge, easily shoved aside.

Access to the log store roof, from which jumping is possible.

Foolish parking of wheelbarrows or garden benches / seats near the fence, that can be used as climbing aids.

The weakness of the small garden gate into the field: this is blown open when there is a strong westerly, enabling Dimwoof to use the field and back drive for access to Trouble.

The tumbledown gate into said field at the bottom of the vegetable patch. This now resembles a sort of Pikey Fort Knox, with its home-made barrier of waste wood, old doors, bits of pole and other refuse. Crowning the arrangement is a willow screen, which the dog has bent forward like the prow of a ship and upon which the Dimwoof now stands, like the child on the barricades in Les Miserables, surveying the  horses. It’s a ten-foot drop the other side, and not even Dimwoof is Dimwoof enough to leap down. So far.

And finally, this week, her latest ruse: using the bracing timbers on her side of the fence and gate as a ladder, or springing point: she takes off using these and vaults the fence to freedom. I’ve now covered them with odd bits of planking so she can get no purchase.

See what I mean? It shouldn’t be this difficult. I accept that chopping off her legs would have worked, but I am not cruel. I accept that tying her up would work, but I don’t like to see tied-up collies. Building a huge run would work, but huge runs require money, which I have not got, and technical ability, which I have not got.

The battle of will and wit will therefore continue. And so will the nagging worry that comes, for me, with losing it.

And so will the other, ever-present, nagging worry: what happens when the Dimwoof realises the fence on the other side of the garden is at least two feet shorter than the one she expends so much effort climbing?

Pleasures postponed

Typical. I discuss the joys of summer last week and the heavens open and that’s it for another seven years, no doubt. Typical.

There were a last few pleasures before the rain set in for another long, grey Cornish winter: dinner with produce entirely from the garden (a spicy vegetable curry, if you ask, as it’s still warm enough to have all the windows open); tennis with the boys, young Tom joining in for the first time; a dip in the river; a trip to a cricket match (Brother Hamster, Old Father Cullingham and his Management, the boys and I enjoyed Callington against Somerset last week in a charity 20-20 match); these, and more – all the things that make a seven-year wait for an all-too-brief summer so very frustrating.

Private lives

It wouldn’t be Monday without a bit of politics, would it? Just a little bit, though.

We are told the National Health Service is not being privatised. Rubbish. It’s so far down the road to privatisation – the doors thrown open to the pharmaceutical corporations to cash in on their blood money, private firms running (badly) social care and out-of-hours doctor services and ambulance provision – it can only be a matter of time before, like all other privatised former state services, it starts asking for an increase in its taxpayers’ subsidy so it can keep up the payments to the shareholders. Some estimates put the value of contracts with the private sector in the NHS at £8.4 billion.

At our little financial level, Management went to the quack last week and required three different potions: three different prescription charges, not one, of course, and £23. That’s what I call free at the point of need!

The previous week I took my dad for a chest X-ray at his local cottage hospital. It being the sort of local hospital which used to be widespread before centralisation of services, the whole process was quick, friendly and efficient, unlike the day-long life-in-your-hands ordeal that comes with risking one of the huge factory hospitals.

But he’s still had to wait nearly two weeks to hear the result! Yet again! How can that be fulfilling the health needs of my father? Anybody given an X-ray is going to worry about the why and what and where – that worry should be dealt with immediately.

Where’s the money?

There’s money alright – it’s positively everywhere, from the Trident programme to the pockets of top earners, from the £500,000 pay packets of academy school heads to the 30 per cent profit margins pushed by the water companies for their shareholders, from the £440m annual profit made by Royal Mail that’s shortly to be gifted to the private sector to the non-existent French-style cap on drug prices paid to pharmaceutical companies…. It’s everywhere. There’s plenty of money – there’s just no will whatsoever to disturb a status quo that rewards the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.

And finally

Lots of that money is used by the rich, and by businesses, to fund the Conservative Party, of course, which has been – incredibly – assuming the moral high ground over Labour’s funding from the trade unions.

Please don’t get the idea that I support the Labour Party. I do not. But I do have more time for a party funded openly and accountably by working people to further their interests than I do for a party furtively funded by the rich to further their interests. What I do ask you to note is that the Tories launched their latest cliché-driven, myth-made assault against the unions and Labour’s funding, against which the craven cowards of New Labour offered little defence, because of allegations against the trade union Unite in the Falkirk constituency in Scotland.

Labour asked the Police to investigate. And they have found no evidence whatsoever of law-breaking. (Just as well I’m telling you. The Tories won’t).

Radio 4’s investigation, which makes it crystal clear that there was no vote-rigging scandal in Falkirk, is worth a listen: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/r4report#playepisode1 Yet again, our constant theme is reinforced: behind the cliché and myth the media ask you to believe obediently, The Truth Is Out There.

 

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