Big Dogs and Little Thoughts.

Two Leonbergers insisted on making friends with me today. And since each of them was the size of a small bear and weighed more than I do, I chose not to spurn their advances.

Just in case you don’t know, Leonbergers are not slices of roast lion topped with grilled cheese and coleslaw and served in a bun. They’re dogs. Note the spelling; they’re named after a town in Germany and have no trouble finding ways of making you talk. This is a Leonberger:

 

On a completely unrelated note, there’s a lie I want to tell on my blog. The problem is that I always said I would never tell a lie on my blog and I never have. Not wanting to break my golden rule, I’ve been trying to think of a way in which I can suggest an untruth so compellingly that it will be instantly and wholly believed. But that would only serve my intention to deceive, which is effectively the same thing as telling a lie. And so I've discovered that serving one's intention to deceive without telling a lie in some form or another isn't at all easy.

At the moment I’ve given up, but I’m paying great attention to Dr House in the hope of picking up a tip. He’s very good at that sort of thing. And it stands to reason that I’m not going to reveal why I want to engage with the game of deceit because then it wouldn’t work, would it?

And on another completely unrelated note, there’s a young woman I often see in the coffee shop and she was there again today. I first noticed her because she bears an uncanny facial resemblance to the former Lady B’s sister, but there the similarity ends.

Today she was keeping the company of a late middle aged woman who was droning on and on to such an extent that the object of my interest was relieved of the compulsion to reply. All she had to do was carry on eating, only offering bits of eye movement and general body language to indicate that she was listening. And so I watched her eat, and her method was not quite what you might call ‘decorous.’ I imagined her thought processes running along the lines of ‘If I open my mouth just a bit wider, maybe I can fit even more in next time.’ And she seemed to be enjoying remarkable success in that endeavour.

Eventually I grew bored with observing her munching method and widened my inspection a little further. I noted that her eyes looked substantially more intelligent than her mouth, and that her feet were far too big to belong to a native of a small market town. But then I remembered that Ashbourne is surrounded by farmland and concluded that her antecedents probably lay somewhere in that direction.

The only thing I couldn’t work out was what the look in her intelligent eyes meant when they occasionally turned to watch me watching her. That one failure apart, I can report that an interesting twenty minutes was enjoyed in the full knowledge that being a born observer can make being endlessly alone quite a lot of fun.

Currently listening to some heroic Vaughan Williams. I do so love VW when he’s being heroic.