Of Flea Doom, Dogs and Cousins

Last week  Graham popped into our local pet supply shop in Hull to get some Flea Doom.
     Now, as anyone who has bought any recently will know, the good stuff is not cheap. £22 for a box with three doses in - which between two dogs means one and a half doses each.
    So last Sunday he got the box to give Tallulah and Bridie their dose and found that the box was empty. Wondering if he had had a 'senior moment' and thrown out the full box and kept the used and now empty one, Graham delved into the wheelie bin and found the box which he had thrown away. Yes it was empty too. I asked him if he had kept the till receipt, no, of course not.
     So this week we had to go again and buy another box, so that we can flea doom the dogs and get rid of any little passengers. When he went to the counter and paid, Graham asked the assistant to open the box just so he could check that there was something inside this one, and explained why.
   'It sounds like you got one of the dummy display boxes,' they said, 'They aren't supposed to be put out for sale.'
    So no help there, not even an apology, or a handful of free chews in compensation.


     When we got home from the shops we found that we had three dogs.
     Charlie was visiting, so we had three dogs trying to poke their noses into the shopping bags and wondering what that yummy smell might be.
     It wasn't long before Charlie and Tallulah got bored and went out to play in the garden again - I say 'garden', more like a mud pit at the moment, having been churned up by three hounds racing round and round.
    Anyway, sometimes the play gets a bit lively and noisy, so Graham popped his head out of the back door to shout at the dogs, to see the frozen tableau of Charlie underneath facing one way, Tallulah on top facing the opposite way, but Tallulah's back leg in Charlie's mouth. The look on their faces clearly saying 'What?' in the tone of teenagers everywhere.
     It reminded me of an incident when we used to have a shop in Barton, the town at the south end of the Humber Bridge. I glanced out of the window one day and across the road I could see a boy holding another boy around the neck, his head under his arm, and casually punching the second boy in the head.
    I opened the shop door and shouted 'Oy!' across the road and the tableau froze. Then the standing lad shouted to me. 'It's ok missus, he's me cousin!' and the lad under his arm nodded vigorously and shouted 'Yeah!'