Youth club came and went, although with the thought that Harry might move to the far wood it all felt a bit different somehow. Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so much part of it. It wasn’t helped by receiving a letter from the Woodland Council stating that they had reconsidered my application to build a den and had now given permission as long as certain criteria were met. It didn’t feel nearly so exciting now that Harry wasn’t going to be part of it. On a brighter note, one or two of the other animals have offered to help me build it, but I need to get some money together first.
It has been so hot I have been a bit less energetic than normal. That’s one of the problems of a black coat that you can’t take off, as soon as the sun comes out it really is difficult to keep cool. I have been tempted to get in the pool, but somehow seeing my mistress disappearing into the water can be a little disconcerting. I have barked at her a bit and run round to the other side, to see where she has gone but it is as though part of her has vanished. I have however become an expert at using the foot stool to bounce up onto the hammock. It only seems to work when there is already someone in it, and admittedly they do get a bit of a shock but it is usually my mistress and she is used to me. I do feel a little bit guilty about the paw shaped bruises that she has got on her leg where I used her as a springboard to jump off the other day.
My mistress still hasn’t entirely got the hang of living in Belgium. The other day we went to a little restaurant for lunch. It is only about 4 miles away, but being English she did the usual thing and got in the car to go there. She said she felt a bit ashamed of how lazy she was as she watched all the Belgians arriving by bicycle, many of them significantly older than my mistress. She tried to convince me that she would have got sunburnt cycling but I wasn’t convinced. After how negative my mistress had been about banks I thought I would ask her whether there was a reason. She asked me how many I would like! The most recent she said, was a couple of weeks ago when she received a cheque for €10 and so paid it into her account, which is a euro bank account. She was a little surprised to find just 32cents credited to her account and €9.68 deducted by the bank for the privilege of cashing it because it was drawn on a bank in a different country and all because I had complained that two boxes of my morning Frosties didn’t have enough sugar coating on.