Le vacance

Moi, le seadog, at St Martin

Hi, c’est moi - Rocco again - back from moi vacance en France. As you can read, learning French is easy, if you spend most of your time listening as you lounge around in cafes (more of that later).

It was hot hot hot pour moi, the humans spent a lot of time in the boring swimming pool but not moi as this activity is wrong for dogs. I like to dip myself gently in a stream or perhaps the sea. That is dignified, whereas a swimming pool or even an inflatable paddling pool is undignified and wrong, obviously.

For the first time in my life, I took to getting up at (or before) dawn to demand my morning walk and it was very pleasant to survey the countryside in the cool morning air. Despite the grumpy companion, obviously.

Walk round me!

I developed a winning strategy when we all went to restaurants or cafes. I lay myself in the doorway or in the gaps between tables. It is a strange thing but the French don’t seem to mind at all and politely step over me or walk around me – very gratifying, lol.

Whilst we were en vacance the French hunting season started. For the rural French this means that they dress-up like Serbian paramilitaries and go out shooting at the few songbirds left over from last year. Every year they shoot quite a lot of each other, particularly after the compulsory boozy lunch. They are supposed to wear orange tabards but our locals regard this as sissy – can you imaging Ratko Mlidic in one? So they shoot each other instead. Gus and Judy wear their jazzier shirts when walking me in the evening.

The shooters take their dogs out with them, about the only exercise these poor chaps have all year, the French aren’t hot on walkies. On one of my morning walks we came across a couple of heavily armed locals with their springer spaniels. The shooters were pissed-off that their dogs asked me, very politely, if they could come on my walkies instead.

Gus says, in the old days (pre-revolution) only the gentry could shoot pidgeons etc and there were all kinds of laws to stop the peasants hunting - so come the revolution it became part of the birthright of the French to slaughter the songbirds. 

I confine my hunting to giving the local cats a hard time. He he he. One year a cat dashed into a farmhouse kitchen window we were passing so I followed it in through the window. I can’t think what all the fuss was about.

This year on a dawn walk I saw a cat mousing very intently in the middle of a field that had just been harvested. I dashed at it, it swore at me and ran off but not bothering to run fast, I ran after it, but making sure I wasn’t too fast as I like chasing not catching. The cat got to a telegraph pole and looked round at me saying that this was ‘homey’, it acknowledged that I had won, but couldn’t be bothered to climb the pole. I wandered off to admire the view, this unsporting animal is not the kind of cat to chase, obviously.

AAagh! What is this all about? A dog wearing pants!