Walks do get boring.  Not as bad as going to swingparks or soft play when you have toddlers, but definitely on a similar list.

There are routes we can’t take if it’s been raining a lot as the mud is so dangerous.  There are routes we can’t take if there is ice.  There are routes we can’t take if Coco needs to avoid other dogs for ‘lady’ reasons.  There are routes we can’t take if I need to avoid other people for miserable cow reasons.  There are routes I do so often that I will scream if we do them again.  I’m told – by Paul – that I need to listen to podcasts or music.  I don’t really do music, and I hate most radio.  So, usually, I just talk to myself or think through books or get maudlin, but, today, I try a combination of road-we-don’t-take-much and iPod.

I don’t take the route which passes some other houses as there are lots of dogs in one of them.  They are in an outside run and they bark constantly from a long time before you pass them until you are out of sight down a long dirt path.  They can’t get out – and they’re quite old anyway – but I feel guilty when I trot merrily along, out with my dog for an hour, while they’re locked up, so my guilt keeps me away.  Today, however, secure in the knowledge that I will go mad if I don’t get a change of footpath, we risk it – I risk listening to music too.

It works very well.  We stay out for ages, and Coco gets to paddle in mud.  It’s a gorgeous day, sunny and frosty.  There are tractors – which I love – and they are working, which means the noise drowns out the fact that I’m singing; a good result for everyone.

When I get back, I even manage to write a bit (although it’s never enough) and Coco sunbathes with an old bone for the rest of the morning.  The walk was good, the different route was good, even the listening to music was good(ish), but I suspect what made the biggest change was that I made a list last night.  Lists, after all, make everything better.

Really – I don’t know what to say.

Me.  My dog.  Up a hill.  Two dumped ancient telephone boxes.

There has to be a story, but I don’t know it.

I’ve just heard that the annual ‘Word’ festival which takes part in Aberdeen every year isn’t happening in 2012.  This is a great shame. Last year, I was intimidated by Margaret Atwood (not personally, but through listening to her speak), met a lovely writer friend for a natter, and had an inspiring time wandering around, delighted at the fact that this event was on my doorstep (now that I live here, my ‘doorstep’ involves anything within an hour’s drive).

Today, I was told that there is a Science Festival in Aberdeen this year, so both events can’t go ahead.  Naturally, writers and words and books get pushed aside.  I’m miffed by this.  I don’t ‘do’ science (unless there are dead bodies and forensics involved), and I need literary festivals to reassure me that I’m real.  Without them, I just sit alone, in my kitchen, at my laptop, with only Coco licking me every so often to remind me that the world is still there.

Literary festivals are important.  They don’t just sell books and make an important economic contribution, they help people like me who produce words in a vacuum, who need a community and who need to know that they are part of that community even when they don’t see it very often.  This is an isolated job, and I have an isolated life – I need coffee and gossip, not talks about ‘what does elephant poo smell of?’ and ‘can your lipstick kill you?’ or whatever lowest common denominator science has been dragged down to this week.

I think I’ll start my own – anyone fancy coming to a ‘Pathetic Writer’s’ Group in my house once a month?  I’ll provide the dog and the cupcakes.

Do dogs enjoy rituals?  Coco has made many of her own, and I think they must comfort her, she must enjoy the predictability of what she does. 

Every morning, when I get up to see the two older ones off to school (they’re terribly afflicted by the condition known as ‘no-breakfast-unless-mum-is-there-itis, and Son 1 has terminal ‘why do I need a coat in the winter?’ disease), she rushes out of her bed and runs to the worktop in the kitchen where Oscar has his food.  He’s a very fussy cat (has anyone ever typed ‘my cat will eat anything – doesn’t bother at all what I put in front of him’?), so the plate is never clear and she gets the leftovers.  To Coco, what Oscar gets is ambrosia.  She makes a three course meal out of a few drops of cat food, shoving his plate around the kitchen in the hope that fervent nose pushing activity will make it fill up again, then wags her tail for ages before the next stage of her morning timetable.  That involves waiting for a bit of bagel, a crust of toast, a few crumbs of croissant, from anyone.  She then rushes outside to the gate to have a quick bark, comes back to see if the stairs are open (see yesterday’s blog), then barks some more to tell me that Oscar has gone out.  Once she’s done all of that she settles down to her own breakfast. Every day.  Every single day without fail.

I have my own rituals of course, but they are based on hope rather than outcome.  Each morning, I tell myself that this will be the day that I’ll manage to sneak back to bed for an extra half hour.  When that doesn’t work, I tell myself that this will be the day I’ll be typing before the school run, not after lunch.  When that doesn’t work, I tell myself that this will be the day when I’ll get an hour of exercise under my belt, not go online at all, start clearing the garden, and not eat crisps at any point.

Coco’s rituals work for her; mine might if they ever moved from my imagination to my real life.

I think we can all accept by now that Coco isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. 

One thing which she is rubbish at is stairs.  They’re just too boring for her.  When going up or down them, there are always things to do – look for food, look for us, look for the cat – so, she generally also manages to whack her head off a wall at the same time.  It’s fine really; we’re a family without much coordination in general, so she fits in well.  However, she is still banned from going upstairs from the days when we first got her and her hips had to be protected.  Now that she’s bigger, I’m not that much of a doggy person that I could put up with her on the beds, so the toddler gate remains.  When she hears it click open, she belts up from wherever she is sleeping and making stinky smells, and tries to bound ahead of whoever is going up, desperate for a sniff at the banned duvet covers and hopeful that a child will have left a plate of sandwiches lying around for her.  She is particularly keen on sleeping halfway up the stairs and is always willing to interrupt one sleep for another somewhere else.

My rule (always ignored, but great in theory) is that no one is allowed up or downstairs without carrying something which needs to be in a different place on a different level.  Of course, no one does this, but I’m trying to keep to my own diktat.  This means that, most gate opening sees me,  with my own ‘challenges’ of coordination, carrying piles of washing, being pushed aside by Coco, and tripping.

I’ve tried to get her to calm down but I swear that when I screech ‘Coco!  No!’ or one of the many variations, she only hears ‘Coco!  Aren’t you marvellous?  Please continue to put my life in danger by making me fall over!’

So, I’ve taken to blocking her path with my substantial girth and hissing ‘manners!’ at her.  Oddly, it’s working.  She does hold back until I get to the top, and I now have a dog who – to outsiders – would appear to have a fabulous vocabulary.

She’s still dim though.

Coco’s killer instinct has reached new levels. 

When we were out today, there was shooting going on in the woods just a bit beyond the path.  One of the pheasants was flying away from it all and swept in front of Coco, very low.  Just as it came, she jumped up to try and catch it, mid-flight.  She managed.  As always, it was very impressive but also hideous. 

She stood there, very pleased, with a huge, HUGE, red and gold and green gleaming pheasant thrashing about in her jaws.  Now, I really don’t like pheasants.  I really don’t like birds, but I still don’t want to see them murdered in front of me.  I particularly don’t want Coco to give them to me, half-dead (half-alive?), so we did a ridiculous dance-chase thing with me squealing ‘no, Coco, no, bad girl, Coco, bad girl!’ while she tried to share the booty with me.

Eventually, she gave up and got on with the killing part while I, like a deranged person, tried to reason with her.  I made some fine arguments, but she just kept crunching pheasant bones and munching pheasant flesh. 

Finally, I walked away and shouted on her to come for a treat.  She picked the carcass up, and I screeched again.  She stopped.  I called her again.  She tried to come with the carcass, I screeched, she stopped.  This went on for a while but she was clearly torn, so I laid a trail of treats Hansel and Gretel style that she was only allowed to come for if she dumped the corpse.

She did. 

By the time she got the end of the line of treats, she was too lazy to go back for the pheasant, so we went on out merry way having learned an important life lesson.  Tesco gravy bones beat fresh pheasant any time.

We don’t really go a bundle on New Year resolutions, but for 2012 had some low level ones – spend less, and be positive.

Ha ha ha.

So, to start the year, this is what we have had the following:

• My car gave decided that a new clutch would be nice and that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds were better spent in a garage than anywhere else.
• Paul’s car decided that it had lost the will to live and that if we didn’t spend a last journey getting it to a garage for a trade-in, it would lie in the driveway with a million other things we have never got round to disposing of forever.  This, of course, involves spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds too (I can’t bring myself to write ‘thousands’ so many times).
• Paul got a grant application turned down.
• My Dad’s health problems got worse.
• My Mum’s health problems got worse.
• The problem I had with my leg before Christmas is now so bad that I can barely move it at times; I croak about when I take Coco on a walk, and then try to get some feeling into it for the rest of the day.

Last year, I wrote a book for someone who talks to angels.  He keeps telling me to give it a go, ask for what I need, thank them in advance for good things which haven’t happened yet.  Of course, I didn’t do this because . . . well, let’s just say it isn’t me.  Then, a few days before Christmas, when I was in town with my daughter, we were faced with a multi-storey car park with no spaces and people driving round in circles.  I, laughingly, said we’d give the angels a try.  I thanked them for the space we were about to find at the lift in a few seconds.  Lo and behold, there it was.  We tried it a few more times and it worked.  (Mind you, it didn’t work more than it did).   I then wondered whether I shouldn’t try it a bit more, hence the commitment to being positive and sparkly and suchlike.

So, what are they telling me with the list of calamity this year already?  I think I know, but I do try to keep the blog sweary-words-free, so I won’t say.

Coco loves me again. 

Having done the post-Xmas weigh-in, I am back on two walks a day.  She is the only creature who could possibly get excited by the sight of me digging out my smelly wellies and zipping up my Michelin man coat.  She doesn’t care that I put her in her lovely/hideous faux sheepskin ensemble; all that matters is that I know how to go out again.  The very obvious way in which dogs love you for very obvious things is delightful.  No mucking about, no talking about you behind your back, no games – just adoration because you walk through muddy fields with them.

When all else fails, go back to Edinburgh.  The cars have both died, so the boys and I take the train down today for the almost-end of the Christmas holidays.  We fit in Dynamic Earth, Camera Obscura, the Edinburgh Museum, all of the High Street, Princes Street and a lot of fake-touristy stuff in a six-hour blitz.  It’s great.  Everyone is chatty, the sun is setting when we look out over the rooftops and it still feels like home every time I come back. 

When we walk along Princes Street in the dark, I am struck by how beautiful it is.  I can’t remember feeling so drawn to or so proud of the place when I lived here, so why does it affect me like this now?

I want to live in a city where there are monuments to writers, where there are museums dedicated to writers, where there is writing, writing, writing everywhere you go.

This is getting serious.

Paul does not agree with the sentiments of yesterday.  He believes that Coco is:

a)    Ashamed of her coat

b)    Looks like a used car salesdog

c)    Will get beaten up by other dogs if they catch her wearing her Del Boy attire

I also note that he has taken to referring to her on his Facebook as his dog.  All of this is so wrong.  Her coat is lovely and she looks even lovelier than usual in it.  She is my dog and the fact that they smooch together, that she lies with her head in his lap while he works and gazes at him, that she rushes to see him in the morning and her tail nearly knocks us all unconscious, means nothing, nothing at all.