First I mistook a little boy for a little girl. ‘What’s your name, miss?’ I asked. ‘Bear.’ ‘Sorry, did you say Belle?’ ‘Bear,’ intoned his mother. ‘He’s a boy.’ Whoops (but he did have long curly blond hair and that’s as good an excuse as any.)
And then I saw Lydia coming down the road with her little girl (I think) and her new whippet puppy. It being the fourth time I’ve encountered Lydia at school run time, I felt that sufficient familiarity had been established to regale her with the Lydia the Tattooed Lady song. She was unimpressed. She carried on walking and muttered something I didn’t catch. And she declined to allow Gwen the dog to come over and smother me in canine affection, even though Gwen the dog seemed desperate to do so.
I think I’m becoming ever further removed from the tolerance of the Shire dwellers, but that’s no problem since there are so few of them I want to be tolerated by anyway. I don’t mind being thought a fruitcake, you see, but it does concern me a little that I might be becoming creepy in my advanced years. I wouldn’t like to become – or even be thought – creepy, but it’s such a difficult characteristic to define, isn’t it? What’s creepy to one person is eccentric to another.
Still, it’s life and life only, and as long as the horses and dogs accept me for what I am, that will suffice.
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