Encounters that need a blog (and other stories)

So from my break from achieving a fairly minimal amount of productivity relative to the hours I have been sat in front of the computer, I decided to take a break with Newf and take her for a walk up the river, despite her being in the physical and metaphorical dog house after vomiting up whole strands of seaweed and a great deal of saltwater over the carpet just as I'd sat down with my jacket-and-beans for dinner last night (the house still smells like a trawler), and waking me at 3am to tell me that she'd finally realised that oh yes she really did need the toilet after all after drinking seven gallons of water to rehydrate herself before slinking off to bed.

The walk was beautiful, the sun was shining, my phone had decided to work again, albeit erratically and not wonderfully effectively after dropping it down the toilet last night (don't ask) and spending the night in pieces on the radiator to think about what it had done, so I was able to at least stumble blindly over twigs and roots, trip over nothing-at-all at extreme regularity and narrowly avoid various piles of misc dog related elements.

Then Newf met a friend. And I met the friend's owner.

We'd briefly encountered each other on the weekend, so I knew Newf was in with a good chance of not bullying it into submission, terrorising it, angering it or terrifying its owner. So off they went, Newf and friend, Newf submissively and kindly let her new friend try to hump her at various different angles (none of which were entirely correct, but thankfully her lady op meant I had little to concern myself with) and generally played various games involving driving her hefty 8 stone soaking frame into my legs at every opportunity as they bounded about together.

So I chatted to her friend's owner, a woman I'm guessing of her fifties, about various dog related things (all paving the way for playground talk of later years, I'm hoping this is an investment in small talk and How To Look Interested In Other People's Dogs/Children* *delete as applicable).

Then she told me she hadn't had a very good February. I'm not sure if I asked her quite why, but she proceeded to tell me anyway.

She launched immediately into telling me her ex husband had been found dead. This I managed to swiftly put an understanding but not too sympathetic (noticing the 'ex') look onto my confused face while she told me more, as the dogs crashed into each other and myself and tried to make ineffective puppy love.

Then she proceeded to tell me that he'd been pronounced dead on the Thursday when in fact he'd died on the Wednesday night. She knew this because, as she put it, she'd 'seen a fair amount of dead bodies in her time'.

Right. I didn't ask her about that.

She then went into not insignificant detail about exactly how bodies appeared as they were decomposing (including a rather traumatic tale about her daughter being summoned home from her holiday and not being able to look at the body for a week, by which point it was in a severe state of decay).

This story, embellished with a great deal of detail, then led on to another relative's hospitalisation, by which point my back had begun to drip with sweat, my legs had begun to sway, a prickling sensation had startled my skin and then, suddenly, my hearing went and I could only decipher words through what appeared to be a large volume of water or a rather effective pair of earmuffs. All the while the dogs were continuing to bounce wildly around us in gay abandon.

So I made my excuses and carried on walking soaked, happy and completely disobedient Newf as I tried to compose myself.

The baby had clearly decided it was time for beans and less talk about rigor mortis.