Gone To The Dogs

Now I have full-time employment I also have colleagues. One would wish for colleagues like Gareth, Colin or Johnny. But no. It’s hard to get any fun or indeed human interaction of any kind and therefore to have remained sane by Friday. My best bet - and my main source of Jeremy Clarkson news - is Doru, a jolly decent chap but with rather low horizons: “Barry Bogiss he won last night”; “Eh??”; “European Long Distance Lawnmower Rally. You did not see on Eurosport 2?”; “Oh, errr, yes, of course, errr...”; “Sven Spodsen he started well but his rotor blades were set too high. In London is raining a lot, yes?”; “…yes, indeed, yes, almost all the time, yes……. Chim chiminey, chim chiminey chim chim cher-ee….”.

So after the departure of my donkey friend, I’ve been forced to turn for companionship to the canine community. Dogs are plentiful here: domesticated, wild, feral, bi-feral, feral-curious… one of my wife’s cousins even has a dog that’s half wolf! I remember when it was the cutest puppy you ever saw, but now it’s a wolf, though for some reason still as soft as shite. The man next door has dachshunds, which he tells me – inexplicably, unless it’s to make me feel at home – are English. I’ve been convinced there are at least 20 of them, but Mrs Dilo assures me that because they move around so quickly and randomly it just seems like there’s a lot. I therefore applied my A.I. unsupervised learning and pattern recognition skills and deduced that there’s 3 of them, based on 3 distinct emergent patterns of fur-colouration. But Mrs Dilo, again, whose eagle eyes spot bargains, gypsy misdeeds, and the differences between hedge warblers and sedge warblers from several kilometres distance, assures me there’s 4 of them, but that 2 look quite similar. And they’ve got names: “Bruno”, “Blackie”, “Boo-Boo” and – oh yes – “Lady”.

Another mystery solved. I’m now friends with them all and with their Ţuică-breathed owner. We’ve barred them from our garden by boarding up the holes in the fence, but Bruno in particular can make himself incredibly low to the ground so it’s only a matter of time before he’s crapping on our carpet.

Gadjo Dilo’s Peccadillos

GD likes to think of himself as a decent sort, the type of chap you’d be happy to take home to meet your parents, but, as previously stated, he is also A Man, and as a man he has certain baser desires, cravings, whims, fancies – let’s call them “needs” – that need to be addressed, especially when he’s been overworking...

National Costumes

There’s something attractive about a woman – any woman – in national costume (morris dancers excepted, obviously). I don’t demand that the missus changes into hers on a Saturday night after Match of the Day is over, but I probably wouldn’t object if she did.

Armpits

Armpits?? As I mentioned recently to Daphne Wayne-Bough, I consider the armpit - whether depilated or as sweatily hirsute as nature intended - to be a neglected erogenous zone. If I was a Turkish sultan I could fill each of my concubines’ armpits with half a pound of nutmeg butter and then take tiffin, but I’m not and I can’t think of any woman daft enough to go for this.

Lady Pole-vaulters

I had a thing for ginger, pasty-faced Russian pole-vaulter Svetlana Feofanova - I didn’t stalk her, but was off work sick in a foreign country and reduced to watching Eurosport. I don’t take aesthetic interest in other athletics events – most are just so linear - but pole vault is different. It’s the orgasmic moment when the run up's completed, the pole is straining to the max and then catapults the lass high, high, high into the heavens.

Bandages

Bandages???? In our folk dance class one of the women had a bandage round her for foot for a few weeks; a woman’s foot is hardly her most attractive feature but my eyes were aways drawn to it. What’s that all about?? I reckon it's the protective instinct: I just want to hold their poor bandaged body parts in my strong manly hands and look reassuringly into their eyes saying “It’s alright, little one... I’m here now”.

Woman who Take an Interest in Geometry

In the office where I work there are almost no distractions, but it’s near Cluj Polytechnic and we have a balcony. As I suspect is common in Eastern Europe, a large proportion of the engineering students are girls, and they often pass by with set-squares and t-squares protruding from their satchels - I’d like to think one or two of them have a complete set of French curves in there as well! It’s not that I want them to tell me about minutes and seconds of degrees etc – that would be ghastly – but, you know, just to have a general and healthy appreciation of possible angles.