Dog injury

Do not panic, the dog is not injured, rather her owner is, so in that case you may resume panicking.

A fair few days ago, I was sat on the sofa about to tuck into a somewhat tasty looking bag of crisps. If you could picture the scene you’d see that I was on one side of the living room, sitting as I always do in my favourite seat and the dog was curled up in her basket on the other side of the room.

One thing I have come to realise is that the dog has the kind of hearing ability that is akin to scarily brilliant. On a field she can hear the rustle of an animal a long distance away. In the house she can hear the opening of a tasty bag of snacks from anywhere.

I opened the crisps and before I knew it, 40kg of dog was steaming over to see what delicious snack food she was going to get. Such was her excitement that she jumped up to get closer to said snack food. For me this is where it all went wrong, she caught me entirely my surprise and I was therefore completely unprepared for her arrival.

Almost in slow motion I saw this grey blur come into my field of vision and then plonk straight down into my lap. Unfortunately for me, the dog put pretty much all of her weight into one of her front paws and the first thing that paw made contact with was my testicles, specifically my left one. I swear I saw stars float past my eyes for a good five minutes afterwards.

What was more embarrassing was explaining what had happened to the doctor who I’m sure thought it was some kind of sexual game gone wrong rather than an innocent dog incident.

The diagnosis? A badly bruised testicle and a dog that loved the bag of crisps that ended up on the floor.

Black hawk not down

The army helicopters were out practising manoeuvres again last night.

As I wandered through our field of choice, the dog was playing with what looked like the best stick ever, when I was aware of the dull thud of a helicopter approaching, even over the dulcet tones of Heidi Rodewald (www.stewsings.com click on Bio page and then scroll down) echoing through my ears.

Unlike the last time this happened, this time there were two helicopters. The first swooped overhead probably 200 ft off the ground, with all of its lights out. Now that was quite strange. The second then followed seconds later, with all its lights on almost as if it was searching for the first one.

It was very impressive indeed. In fact I was so impressed that as the second one came over I waved at it. It was of course dark, so I put my wave down to excited boyish joy at such machinery. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Googling medical complaints v2

I had another appointment at St Georges today, this time with a consultant I hadn’t ever seen before. He was quite brisk and hurried – I was in and out of the hospital in 30 minutes flat.

Anyway he mentioned some further detail on the operation I am waiting to have, which I promptly put to one side in my memory for further investigation upon my return home.

If I hadn’t learnt my lesson the last time, I have now. Never again. In fact if I could I’d remove all search engines from my web browsers.

Protected: A close escape with a mental asylum

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A little bit of charity goes a long way

Over the past few weekends I’ve been redecorating my office at home and the spare bedroom as well as tidying the loft up. Having carefully sorted through piles and piles of books I ended up with five large boxes with ~300 books that I’d read and didn’t see myself reading again. Being stuck for somewhere to keep them I decided instead to donate them to charity.

I rang up a local well known hospice and arranged to drop the five boxes off at one of the local charity shops. They were a) very grateful for the donation and b) even more grateful that I was happy to bring them in rather than have someone come and pick them up.

So last Friday morning I loaded the Jeep up and trundled into Oxford to drop the books off. The staff at the shop were really pleased and immediately started ruffling through to see what what was there and what prices they could sell things for. With the exception of one or two, all the books were in very good condition, so hopefully they’ll help raise some money for a good cause.

I had a spring in my step for the rest of the day.