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.

TV Transylvania #2

I sent my previous list of suggestions to the Director General of TV Transylvania but so far have heard nothing. Very strange considering how my wife’s friend knows his cousin’s hairdresser and was sure she could put in a good word for me. Anyway, there you go, I’ve had to think of a couple more:


TIME TOILET

The state of the toilets in rural Romania would make a coprophile blush, but I don't mind them. (The smell of one’s wife’s relative’s crap may be overpowering but at least it makes a change from the smell of animal crap which is dominant elsewhere.) And they’ve given me a first-rate idea for another TV show. Like those kids shows* where mop-topped youngsters or English eccentrics go into a tunnel or a phone box or whatever and it takes them to another moment in time. Except in this show people would be transported to 2009 – yes, THE PRESENT! Bloke goes in thinking about his animals, his soil, Laura Lavric (again) and his dinner, and he emerges thinking about hedge funds, feng shui, Russell Brand and existential angst. He’ll wish he hadn’t bothered. Plus, all the nations’ couch potatoes are laughing at him!

*Yes, yes they are, they’re kids’ shows: Doctor Who is not scripted by Shakespeare, in the same way that Harry Potter books are not written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.


TOP DACIA*

This was going to be a contrived attempt to tell Jeremy Clarkson that he’s wrong. I used to hate him, seeing as how I’ve almost never owned a car yet don’t feel my life to have been entirely meaningless. Admittedly, I gained a grudging respect for the man when he convinced the nation that oily rag I. K. Brunel was our number 2 Briton. But now I just found out that he punched arch media-tw*t Piers Morgan, and my hatred has turned almost to affection. A Dacia is a Romanian car. They make fancy ones now with French engines and cappuccino holders, but the real one is a 1970s design that you run on petrol, butane, ţuică, manure, or any mixture thereof. It’s the best car here simply because it’s 6 inches higher off the ground than any other car, and it needs to be. If Clarkson ever has to do community service for crimes against the ozone layer, I’ll make a case for the defence that he comes here and makes programmes only about Dacias, and he’s got to have a pig on the passenger seat and 2 ton of straw on the roof-rack.

*Pretend that it rhymes with “Gear”, though it doesn’t really.