Time to confess. The apple crumble incident, as it shall always now be known, was just a simple misunderstanding that any puppy could make. It was me against the kitchen scales and this time out, they won! If they will have silly old fashioned scales that use brass weights on a cast iron stand what can they expect? They are not even metric weights, I’m just a simple Belgian dog, how can I be expected to understand imperial measurements? Weigh 6 ounces the mistress said. After we had got through the whole ‘what’s an ounce?’ thing and she had explained that that had been how they measured things in England and for the sake of ease of understanding (clearly in contrast with the difficult metric system) there were 16 ounces in a pound and 14 pounds in a stone and these were not the same pounds as you spend in shops! Just to make it easier ounces is abbreviated ‘oz’ when there isn’t even a ‘z’ in the word and ‘pound’ is abbreviated ‘lb’ when there isn’t an ‘l’ or a ‘b’ in the word, unless it is the type you spend in shops in which case it is ‘£’ and I have no idea why that is!
So, on one side of the scales I put the 4-ounce weight and the 2-ounce weight on their little stand. On the other side, in the pan, I started to pile a very large quantity of margarine. The tub I had got ran out so I got another one out of the fridge, or at least tried to. I find that even standing on my back legs I can’t quite reach the very top of the fridge so I had to ask the mistress to come and help. It was just then it all came to light. She said there was much more than that on the tub she had already given me and I couldn’t possibly need any more. I said I definitely did, it was nowhere near balanced yet. So she came over to have a look. Well diary, if you have been paying attention you will already know what was wrong. I had included the weights ‘on their little stand’. That would be the stand that is made out of cast iron and on it’s own probably weighs about a kilogram. Rather than trying to weigh out 6 ounces it meant I was trying to weigh about 1kg and 6 ounces and even I know that that would have been an awfully big crumble! I’m sure I could have eaten it though; my mistress says I already weigh 12.5kg and that is quite enough for now.