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Are you excited for the 6000th consecutive Warming Up? Hope you’ve organised a street party so you and your community can enjoy it all together. Chances are it’ll be about something that my daughter has said that I think is funny, but isn’t. But you have to take what you get when a blog gets this old.
I took the dog out for an early morning walk as usual. I was a bit tired and grumpy as usual. Halfway up the hill Wolfie went up on to the verge to toilet herself. Although technically off the path and away from danger I have been driven to dog poo disposal evangelism by the actions of some of my fellow dog walkers (letting their dogs shit prodigiously on the path without clearing up, on the gravel outside a neighbour and worse the person who bags the poo but hangs it on fence) and so went up the bank to see what had emerged from my dog’s cloaca. It turned out it was just a wee (or at least there was no poo there so that was what I surmised), so I didn’t have to pick it up because trying to pick up dog wee would be insanity. Unless you had brought a straw. And I had not.
On coming down the shallow bank though I slipped and fell heavily on to the hard sun-baked path (luckily not on to some dog shit from a dog of an unscrupulous owner) hitting my arm and my knee and losing my dignity. No one was around, but I was on a hill and might have been observed and it felt like a humiliation. Especially as I was already grumpy. Also it hurt.
I am still just about young enough to fall over than to have a fall, but I had to lie there for a few moments to curse my stupid luck and the whorish force of gravity and also to ensure I was all right.
I was all right, apart from bumped bones and a bit of mud on the knees of my trousers. I was wearing some old suit trousers, partly for the eccentricity of dog walking in posh clothes and partly because I can wear my wellies without the trousers bunching up and becoming uncomfortable. But now due to my grumpiness and vanity and religious pursuit of excrement, even if the excrement isn’t there I had trudged and slipped and was now an old man lying in the dusty dirt.
Wolfie came to see I was OK. I still wasn’t sure. Maybe I’d broken all my limbs and was going to die here.
Turned out I was OK and I went on my way. Though my knee hurt for the rest of the day.
Soon enough such a fall might do me in or curtail my freedoms. But for now I may rise again.
