Thursday 29th July 2010

So far my Mistress has picked two blackberries from our front garden and frozen them in the hope of getting enough to make some more sorbet. At the rate of picking one a day I think it might be a few years before we get our own home grown sorbet. She has now mentioned to my Master the idea of having an allotment. To say he wasn’t very keen would be an understatement, although he was cheered at the prospect that the rent would only be 50pence a year. At that rate even I could make it worth it. I wonder if we could get Shadow to go to the allotment when she wanted a dig, rather than her do it at home.

One of the problems with the summer holidays is long car journeys in which you have to sing ‘Old McDonald’ and play I-spy. To be fair I-spy has progressed somewhat over the last four years that I have been playing it. We used to have ‘silent’ letters at the start of words, so ‘something beginning with p’ might actually be a turkey – something that not only began with a ‘t’ but which you couldn’t see either. Now we have moved on to a more surreal level of play in which it might be things inside the body and it might be ‘blue’ or as was the case yesterday ‘brown’. I have to say it does make for a game that can last for hours. What we did discover in singing ‘Old McDonald’ was that it’s very difficult to get the breathing right on the lines that you have to oink. Oinking seems to involve an action which prevents simultaneous breathing. All very difficult, although to be fair my Mistress said that is exactly the noise I make when I’m snoring, but I can’t believe that for a minute.