The Longest Way Home
There’s little more unsettling and tedious than being woken up by squealing toddlers at 6 am, waiting to be let out for a wee (me not them, they just do it in their nappies), then waiting another half hour until the boys start flicking milky Cheerios onto the floor during breakfast, then listening and watching everyone pull on their clothes and whinge about mismatched socks and non-existent wardrobes, then sitting through the pre-leaving-the-house tantrums (usually but not exclusively child ones), and finally being dragged out of the house and to work, ready for a trot in the park at 9.30am. By then I’ve usually lost the will to walk.
Well I say usually … oh how I longed for angry sock combinations and mulchy corn hoops this morning. At 8.30 am I found myself hurtling down the M40 to London without any hope of a decent walk in sight. An hour later we’d been the wrong way round the North Circular, back-tracked to Hanger Lane to find the correct exit, and whoopee found our way to Greenwich to pick up some paintings or something. Apparently we arrived a bit early so the mas took me round the area for a windy walk, a very long wee and a poo on the pavement (absolutely no greenery anywhere, not a jot; just cranes and boarded up land being bulldozed for the 2012 Olympics). As concrete jungles go, there was little in the way of wildlife, or any life, around the place.
The artist and his wife were both at home, and I had to stay in the van whilst the mas collected not only the paintings but decades’ worth of unwanted pish posh. I should explain that Cooky Ma’s recently deceased godmother was the artist’s mother, and there was paraphernalia galore up for grabs. Truth be told, the mas just wanted to collect the paintings and have a bit of a chat, but they’re polite types and consequently found themselves the reluctant new owners of a dusty glass sugar bowl and spoon, three of somebody else’s family photo albums, a 1950s vanity case, four small bottles of off-Port, a packet of Rich Tea (good until October 2009), five bottles of silver dip, two tins of Silvo, twin wicker bins and a ball of string. Items they rejected included another dusty glass bowl, a dodgy looking steamer, some plates, a basket to house Christmas napkins, a family suitcase and a pot of ‘universal household cleaner’ that was so old it had turned to concrete.
Boy was I glad to leave. If I’d been any other dog on the planet, I’d have been back home by 3pm, just in time for a decent walk in the leafy countryside. Sadly, my geographically-challenged mas were driving me home, which meant travelling via Docklands, Essex and South Mimms before arriving back in Oxford nearly three hours later than planned. I even wondered whether I saw a faint glimmer of the Angel of the North winking at me in the distance as we farted along some erroneous A-road for the sixty eighth time.