Thursday

“Hello you two! Are you alright? You look kind of… flat.”

The voice had come from one end of a dog lead. At the other was a tiny Border Terrier who barked and snarled as ferociously as it could as we entered the playing fields.

We looked at each other and told him what had happened since we’d last seen him.

“WHAT!!?? Both of them!? Bloody hell!”

And then…

“Be quiet Ava!”

He’s got two Border Terriers. One is an absolute nightmare and Ava is the better behaved of the two. We knew that they’d been struggling with their dogs’ behaviour and they’d asked us a few times about what we had done to get The Dog so calm now. Given how bad the good one was I wondered what on earth the other one must be like now.

Ava ignored the instruction to be quiet. The Dog looked at her with an expression that could’ve said either “Is that all you’ve got? That’s pathetic.” or “Call yourself a dog?” and wandered off unperturbed.

“To be honest with you, I think our current mood has more to do with being cold, tired and really hungry.” I said.

The Dog and I had been standing outside the village supermarket in the biting wind while Lesley had popped in for some bits. My Dad had done his National Service in what was then called Ceylon so I’d been eating home-cooked curries as long as I could remember. The YouTube algorithm had provided us with a video for a chickpea curry recipe while we having our morning coffee and we had to try it. We already had almost all the ingredients but were missing fenugreek leaves.

We let Ava and her Human go home and heard Ava let rip at another dog in the distance. Everybody else seems to be struggling more with their dog these days while ours has shown a marked improvement in the past couple of weeks. We’re convinced that The Dog’s new placid demeanour is down to the fact that we’re no longer stressed out of our minds by our parents’ failing health.

What is it they say? “Never shop when you’re hungry” is it?

The supermarket had been in the process of marking down items close to their sell-by dates so Lesley came out with armfuls of stuff. Very little of it seemed to fit the diets we were now officially on.

Did they have fenugreek leaves? Nope. Of course not.

Bloody hell.

Author’s Note

My Mum was in a nursing home in the Thames Valley for a year and a half until she passed away in December 2024. My Father-in-law went into the same home the following January. But Lesley’s sister didn’t approve and made the situation so awkward that he had to be moved. He passed away in March 2025. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved.

Image Credit

Original Image by Nick Gilmore. Extracted from the archive in 2024.