Why is it as the pet dog you are always the one that gets left out? All five of them had garden gnomes to paint themselves, as presents from Santa Claus. All five of them have painted their gnomes without any thought for the fact that I might have wanted to be part of it. There must be a gnome equivalent of a dog that I could have painted. I could have coloured in some of their gnomes. Anything not to have been completely left out. So there will stand their little family of gnomes as a permanent reminder of their relative painting abilities last Christmas. Ten years from now they will be able to look back and laugh at their little artistic touches, such as my mistress painting a white blob on the gnomes hat to suggest that the little bird sitting on the tip of his hat might have made a small deposit. There they will be reminiscing without a thought going to the feelings of their beloved pet dog. Gnome is a silly word anyway. How can anything that sounds like it starts with a ‘n’ actually start with a ‘g’? It goes back to when we used to play ‘I Spy’ with Andy and on his turn everything started with a silent letter. He would say “I spy with my little eye something beginning with P” and the answer would be car or “I spy with my little eye something beginning with D” and it would be grass. You could only ever guess right if you could really get behind the way he thinks, which was always more complex for a 3 or 4 year old than any of us used to give him credit for. On the good side it would entertain him for a significant length of time with the added advantage he never lost!