BARKING PART II

Teener, Bloggiana’s daughter looks distracted. I have just come into the parlour from outside where I have been picking leaves and branches out of the back of Our Dog and I am fractious and a bit smelly. Whatever’s wrong? I ask Teener, somewhat sharply. It’s Mummy, she blurts out. She’s gone barking.

I must admit I have been a bit worried about Bloggiana recently and Teener’s announcement strikes me as being entirely plausible. In the wake of her decree absolute thingy being decreed, Bloggiana has taken to being sensationally blunt towards almost anyone she comes across. When she walked into a petrol station the other day, she asked the attendant in a loud voice if he had a finger of fudge. Happily the attendant was a man of the world and took it well. At the pet shop, when the proprietor tried to offer her a Hamster Starter kit for her daughter, she was heard to ask What do I do with it? Add water? In the solicitor’s office, when she was presented with a bill for £575,000 for a telephone conversation with her barrister, she expostulated Blimey, is that all?

Then not so long ago, I found Bloggiana sleepwalking in the hallway. She was wearing full plus fours and a velvet kaftan and the pink wellingtons which Santa gave her last year. This all seemed to be a stage too far so I rang her old friend Doris who lives in the middle East somewhere and told him everything. Doris, I said, I really think you need to come over.

Now Doris and Bloggiana go back a long way. They were at university together, shared friends, lovers, car-crashes, broken dreams. Doris is most certainly in touch with his feminine side and as such, makes an excellent friend for a girl who dresses up in wellingtons before going to bed. When Doris arrived, the first thing Bloggiana did was to unthuck the Pinot Grigio and roll out an extremely incongruous lunch. Jollyosa came and Chumsky and there was a lot giggling about whisper therapy which involves Guy Ritchie going up to Madonna at random moments and whispering to him that she is sexy. (We kind of decided that the therapy didn’t work that well. Too much risk of saliva in the earlobe, was the general conclusion.)

After lunch, Doris, Bloggiana, Chumsky and I went for a walk in a park where the trees grow in a west wind blown arc, high above the neck of our river. The trees are the paralympians of trees, misshapen but unbelievably robust, holding their own over hundreds of years of buffeting. Doris and Bloggiana were walking ahead and there must have been a lull in the conversation. Perhaps Bloggiana looked sad or Doris sensed some dark moment clouding Bloggiana’s otherwise fairly cheerful spiritual landscape. Because the next thing we knew, Doris had stopped in his tracks, extended his neck and pointed his head up towards the bright orb of an autumn day-moon – transforming himself, it seemed, into a yappy dog. And now he was barring the path of his old friend and barking at her, for all his life’s worth. Bloggiana folded up in front of him, convulsed with laughter.

Ever since, when things have been a bit tricky, Bloggiana has taken herself off to the park. And that is why I think Teener is probably absolutely right. Bloggiana has almost certainly gone barking.