Journal

Journal

I was walking through the park the other day, minding my own business, when this dog jumped up and bit me. I don't why. It's not as if I'd ever done anything to annoy it. I hadn't bitten it first or anything. I hardly ever bite animals.

It failed to ruin my mood for a dinner party later that evening though. Luckily there was a servant there who was able to ruin it properly for me. The waiter was offering canapés with what looked like a fishy topping.

"Smoked salmon Sir?" he asked.

"No." I replied. "I've never smoked salmon". That angered me. Do I look like the kind of man who goes around smoking aquatic life forms? I don't think smoking's good for you. Cigarettes killed my uncle Charlie. A crate of them fell off a shelf and broke his neck down at the docks.

Uncle Charlie spent almost all of his adult life down at the docks, on account of the fact that he could never remember where he lived. It was a condition exacerbated, some may say, if they were given to using such a word, by the fact that his wife couldn't stand him and would frequently move house in an effort to confuse him further. At one stage Aunt Maude was moving house at a rate of four times a week. It's a tragic tale.

But not as harrowing as the tale of Great Aunt Agnes and Great Uncle Hubert. They wanted a baby you see. They had been married for years and God had never seen fit to bless them with a child. Then, a whole thirty four years into their marriage, the much waited for happy day came and she gave birth to a daughter. And she was horrible.

Not like Lady Emily who I met at the huntsmen's ball. She was a lovely girl. She made me feel very chivalrous.

She was the kind of girl for whom if her clothes were to ignite I'd gladly beat out the flames with my bare hands, and I told her so. In fact I offered to set fire to her dress just so I could prove the very point, but she didn't seem keen, much to my chagrin. I followed her for weeks, playfully flicking lit matches at her undergarments as she played along, coquettishly screaming and fleeing in apparent terror. The problem with women is that they are unpredictable and hard to train - unlike animals. If I'd been given the chance to train that dog in the park he wouldn't have bitten me, I'd have trained him to bite somebody else.

You'd be amazed at what you can train animals to do. Many mortals have trained dogs to fetch the newspaper. Mine is so well trained that he not only goes out and buys it himself from the newsagent, but he also selects any other periodicals that may be of interest to me while he is there.

And it's not just in the domestic field that trained animals are useful. An entire coal-face of a pit in Barnsley is solely mined by well-trained pigeons, who may be slow but only need feeding a few bread crumbs each day.

My own pioneering work, where I trained an otherwise ill-disciplined bunch of red squirrels to run the entire Chiswick postal sorting office, has sadly come to an embarrassing end due to the entire workforce deciding to hibernate just before the busiest time of the year. Can’t win ‘em all eh?