Sunday 20th December 2009

You may wonder how my Mistress’s trip to Switzerland is going – well it isn’t. She’s back home with her beloved dog. She got out of our village without incident, thanks to some careful driving by my master. She arrived at York station and paid extra to catch an earlier train. She arrived safely in London, but that’s when the problems began. There were no Eurostar trains running due to adverse weather conditions in France. For once, England has dealt with something better than France. Although to be honest that is precious little consolation in the greater scheme of things. My poor Mistress is now having to deal with all the refunds, cancellations and claims on travel insurance that accompany the fiasco, quite apart from the difficulties that come about from not meeting the puppy. There was nothing she could do about it though. She’ll just have to rearrange for another date.

I am to be deprived of one of the fundamental rights of Christmas. Santa is coming to our village this afternoon and I am not allowed to go down to the Green to see him. If it’s all right for Andy to be taken to get a present from Santa, why isn’t it all right for me to go? I am only four after all. Now is not the time to convert my age into human terms, even I realise being 28 wouldn’t qualify me for a present. The argument is even stronger for Shadow. Even if you convert her age to the human equivalent she’s still only about five years old. She definitely should be up there getting a present. I was even prepared to sing carols as I waited for him to arrive. I must say that I wasn’t averse to the mince pies and mulled wine either come to that. Yet again it is one rule for the humans and an entirely different one for the dogs.

Thursday was one of those days. It seemed that everything was going to go wrong. First it started snowing, so my Mistress decided to move her car off our steep drive. That was until she found it had a flat tyre and wasn’t going to be moving anywhere. So she called the nice man from the AA out instead and asked very nicely if he could come to change the tyre. Then she was able at the least to go and buy a new tyre, which took up the time she was supposed to be finishing the Christmas shopping. All in all, she wasn’t best pleased.