Ashbourne Ups and Downs.

I had to call into my GP surgery today on the way to Ashbourne. I was hoping to get a particularly important piece of paper and expected to have to argue strongly for it. (I’d even practiced a few run-throughs and was all prepared to be calmly assertive rather than aggressive.) All I got was the piece of paper, so that was a relief.

And then I met a dog called Wilson. He was a six month-old German Shepherd, and my word was he just the handsomest German Shepherd you could ever have the pleasure of encountering. He seemed to like me, too, and came over for much stroking and commendation. ‘He’s very friendly,’ said the female half of his two human companions. They always do this, you know. Whenever a dog is friendly, the accompanying humans always like to tell you that you’re nothing special. ‘He’s friendly with everybody,’ they say dismissively. Maybe they think you’re going to try to make away with their treasured pet, or maybe they’re jealous. I wouldn’t know. Humans have some pretty strange and disturbing quirks, which is why I mostly prefer to commune with dogs.

And talking of quirks, there’s a woman who works in one of the charity shops who always stares at me when I walk in, especially if she happens to be holding the door open at the time. She used to do it when she worked in a different charity shop, and I wonder whether it’s the small keratosis on my cheek which so fascinates her. (I could have it removed very easily, of course, but the dear old NHS is under enough financial pressure as it is without my adding to it on a matter which is purely cosmetic. I mean, who’s looking?)

OK, the woman in the charity shop is looking, and I harbour the suspicion that she’s thinking: ‘That man still hasn’t washed his face since the last time he had brown sauce on his chips and missed his mouth by about two inches.’ But she probably isn’t.

And I found that plaque I mentioned recently, the one which say that Charles Edward Stuart addressed the crowd there in 1745. It was on the wall of the town hall, next to another plaque commemorating the fact that a man was killed there when an iron bar fell down and hit him on the head in 1930. Such history we have on the doorstep.

But Sainsbury’s had no Staffordshire oatcakes today; that was the real bummer. I do so look forward to my Staffordshire oatcakes with grilled cheese and hot tomatoes rolled into them. In fact, there were several things I couldn’t get in Sainsbury’s today. It was a day of empty spaces on the shopping front. I’m tempted to think that Sainsbury’s – along with much of modern society – is going to the dogs, but I’m not that optimistic.