Saturday Morning

I dreamed I was in the office and I was wearing a bright blue shirt with bright yellow and red splashes of colour on it and I had it unbuttoned down to my stomach, something I have never done in my life. Someone said to me, I should tone it down and wear a smart casual shirt as the shirt I was wearing didn’t qualify as smart, or casual.

And then there was a (real HR name) type person (Theponytail. I’m not going to remember which (real HR name) in years to come, well, I hope I’m not going to remember her. Noone wants to remember the lesser people in their lives) who was crying out for office supplies which were coffee and bags of stuff and silver metal things and she kept whining about them and asking people to get them and no one was getting them. The more she whined the faster her pony tail spun like the rotors of a helicopter. 

Finally, I took it upon myself to get the office supplies. I had to go to Arum’s office And I didn’t know where Arum’s office was and I had to ask people and no one would tell me, but somehow, I knew it was 50 floors up and I just wanted to go, but I didn’t want to get there and have no idea where I was going... and then I woke up, “Ah!” With the sense of oh, thank the universe that was only a dream and all the pent up tension slipped away.

It was 8am. Otto and I went downstairs together. He initially sat on the 1st floor landing and looked up at me as if to say isn’t this great, as he does. I had to coax him downstairs after that.

I closed the study door and the dog proof gate on my way, so he couldn’t scamper back upstairs and jump straight onto the bed to a sleeping Sam and Bruno.

I took him out for a wee and he had a poo, which I needed desperately, a wee, not a poo, so I was pushing him back inside, which is kind of silly as I could have just left him out there, except he is still very much a naughty puppy and you never quite know what mischief he will find to get himself into. 

There was a big wet patch running away from the back left hand tyre of my other car, and I kind of wondered what that could be? A big dog, it would have been Jack Whitehall’s big red dog, Clifford, though? Had someone hosed the corner of the car? Why anyone would do that I didn’t know.

Anyway, I motored back inside to have a wee and I thought perhaps it was the petrol tank, it had been sitting so long it had leaked, you know, a seal, of something, had perished. So, I thought, I had to be a reasonable person, and not a lazy arse, like I usually am, and I had to go back out there and investigate, so I did. (Bored already) I lifted that corner of the car cover and water that had been trapped there, presumably from all the rain we have been having dripped out, so I assume it had still been dripping out, so I was pleased it was only that and not something more serious.

Otto deserted me and went and lay on the couch in the study.

8.33am. Otto joins me on the couch in the lounge room. He lies his fat head on my left arm as I try to type, as all our bulldogs have done.

The news is all boring stories that I will probably live longer if I never read them, all piss and nonsense. When did the Australian news become so interested in American politics. Okay, I do keep up with it on YouTube, but I’m not a national news service.

I do read two articles. One about Scott Johnson, the 27 year old American maths academic who was killed in a gay hate crime in Sydney in the late 1980s.

‘He was a beautiful man’: one man’s long journey to justice for the killing of his brother. After a decades-long battle to discover the truth about what happened to Scott Johnson, his brother Steve has written a book about never giving up. He has written a memoir, A Thousand Miles from Care.

I teared up reading this article, what one brother did for another.

8.50am. Sam and Bruno were up.

I made Vegemite toast and coffee. Bruno and Otto took over the big couch, so I sit on the floor and eat my breakfast.

9.20am. Post shit, Sam feeds the dogs, actually, he was still only preparing their gourmet diet.

The second news article I read is about an Australian abstract artist.

‘I thought, I’ll show you guys’: eye-popping artist Lesley Dumbrell finally gets her due at 82. Since the 1950s, Dumbrell has fought sexism and conservative thinking to be recognised as one of Australia’s most respected abstract painters – and she’s nowhere near done.

She has an exhibition on in Sydney until November, I’ll have to watch out for it coming to Melbourne. I do love modern art, more so than abstract art, but it still sounded interesting.

9.53am. The rain started to fall again. More fucking rain? I guess it is winter, hey?

I realise the fire still has hot coals from last night, so collect sticks of differing sizes from the garden, and I get it going again, all the time supervised by two bulldogs, Bruno anticipating lying in front of it, and Otto trying to get one of the sticks I was using to chew.

10.15am. I make more coffee.

It is going to be one of those wet, Saturdays so I down load 1000 Miles from Care to read as the flames in the fire place crackle.

10.30am. Sam feeds the dogs. Bruno wants to go for his morning wee, and of course Otto wants to go too, so I heard the two of them outside and Bruno wees in the same spot he always wees, he is a dog of habits.

I collect some fire wood for the fire even if I have decided it isn’t as cold as I first thought, still it’s nice to have a fire.

The bulldogs take their sweet time coming back inside, and when they do, Bruno takes up his position sitting in my lap – I sit on the floor at our coffee table – using my right arm as a head rest.

10.45am. The rain started falling again and I was thankful I had revived the fire after all.