ALEX tells me he had a dream in which he has a dog. A Dalmatian to be precise. Only, it leaves him because he didn’t feed it properly.
“Jeez, that sucks,” I say. “If a dog leaves you, you really have to be doing something wrong.”
Nose in the air, bags packed, the Dalmatian says to Alex “I’m leaving. I’m not staying here a minute longer.” Then off he goes, nose down, tail down, into the sunset.
In theatrical fashion, I nearly cry. I say to Alex “Please, I beg you. Don’t tell me any more. This is just too sad.”
The next thing he knows, the Dalmatian is standing on a branch next to his wee suitcase.
Eyes tight shut, I wail “Nooooooooo.”
My mind darts back to the night before when we realised that we had somehow managed to murder a mere cactus through unwitting neglect. After congratulating ourselves on how lovely it looked and how much it had grown. Why hadn’t we thought to look underneath?
I say as much. “Thank God we don’t have kids.”
“And then …”
“No, don’t tell me any more.”
My existential crisis of 2012 … Only weeks after being congratulated by my gardening tutor on how considerate a mother I was to the contents of the wormery I had lovingly set up on my balcony to compost my food waste, I somehow managed to wipe them all out.
Eyes tight shut, I wail again “Nooooooooo.”
“In the end he came back.”
“Aaawww.” Relief.
“With a bunch of other dogs …”
“Aaaaaaawwwwwww.”
“And moved back in.”
“Aaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwww, that’s so sweet.”
“And gave me a big hug.”
“Really? Well, why couldn’t you have just said that in the first place?”