I said I was going to write something every week, and this has turned into a ‘what I did on my holidays’ type post. It’s what I found myself writing, so here goes.
In an attempt to catch the last light of summer, we borrowed a friend’s caravan for a couple of days on the north Norfolk coast. It’s one of those deals where the caravan lives on the site all year, and the owner tows it to plot when you want to use it and hooks you up to electricity if electricity is your thing. We decided to forego electricity and be closer to nature. Apparently electricity doesn’t go as far as the sea. We noticed on the way in to the site, there were a Crazy Golf course and a field of show-jumping hurdles.
There were a few dogs on the site, not any old dogs – pedigree creatures with a sharp intelligence about their eyes. Their humans had set up little fences around their vans, and more and more, the site resembled a dog compound. The thing about intelligent, beautiful dogs is that their audible mode of communication is barking, and to the untrained human ear this can sound the same as the mutterings of a lower-minded canine. Caravans are not known for their high levels of soundproofing and barking – barking growing by the hour as more and more dogs arrived – is not kept at bay by plywood and glass fibre alone, we found out.
By the second day we seemed to be the only unaccompanied humans on the site and it had transpired the previous evening that there was going to be a Dog Agility Competition on the site over the coming weekend. Suddenly the penny dropped with coppery clarity – the hurdles for ponies were in fact hurdles for dogs. The formation of these hurdles had altered into more complex diagrams since our arrival – presumably the early-bird dogs were being put through their paces in preparation for the trials ahead.
The barking didn’t travel over the dunes so we took a few beers to the sea, which was bigger than usual. I’d cut up some lime to go in the fancy beer as we sat drinking and gazing out at the horizon, we were joined by three very friendly Border Collies and their proud owner who told us of their rosettes and triumphs. The dogs showed no respect for my neatly sliced lime sections, which were now very just soggy sand-clumped somethings. The owner appeared not to notice how his trio had laid waste to our idyll, as he cheerily waved goodbye and they marauded off.
We packed up a day earlier than we intended deciding if you can’t beat them, run away. The week was rounded off in a more rock ‘n’ roll way by witnessing a friend jump, fully clothed into a swimming pool at a house party. I’ve since written two new tarot poems, none with barking in per se but the sea and immersion figure in both. I have also just looked up the term ‘Dog Days’ and should have liked to have woven it into this somewhere more neatly, but have instead tacked it on the end because I need to make a potato, tomato and tamarind curry.