Dog or Chocolate Bar?

Before I even get to work I get a text from L saying she’s rescued a Yorkie. Dog or chocolate bar I ask? She doesn’t say. Wonder if that was from MD’s mouth? Still could be either dog or chocolate bar.

Turns out it was the dog variety. She stumbled across him down by the Uni lake on her morning constitutional with the boys. His owner appeared to be nowhere around and it looked like he had just come back from one of Son’s parties only perhaps without the WKD. You know, matted fur and looking he'd spent the night sleeping rough.

So much to the chagrin of our dogs, L decided that a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, scooped him up and carried him home. Good job it wasn't a Rottie. Once home she managed to contact the owners via it’s very well worn dog tag and found out that yes he had been out on the tiles all night. Probably been down the Arb, playing football with cans of Strongbow for goalposts.

So for a while we had three dogs. Which is a worry because L admits she would have kept it. It would have been the same scenario for both dog and chocolate bar but of course a dog's for life not just for elevenses.

It's my first bike of the week today and it’s goes well despite my legs still being stiff from my run, which was as long ago as Tuesday. It's good to be back on the bike because I’ve spent far too long in the car recently and not enough time on the two wheels. Although one advantage of this is that I have managed to catch up on some ‘reading’. A few weeks ago L gave me a new audio book, ‘The Road Home’ by Rose Tremain. I was sceptical, as always, but it turned out to be really good and I got through it in no time. So here’s a brief book review.

It’s the tale of Lev, a migrant who arrives from Eastern European but he does so legally because his country has joined the EU. Once here he tries to make a life for himself in London and to make some money to send home to his unappreciative elderly Mother and his young Daughter. Lev’s wife died young from cancer, a situation that continually haunts him.

At first all he can get is a job delivering leaflets for £5 a day and he has to sleep rough at night. Then though, he gets lucky. He lands a job in a kitchen, at first doing the washing up and cleaning but then later as the vegetable chef.

It’s not so much the story that’s good because the plot is of slightly dubious believability; everything just seemed to fall right for Lev a little too often. It’s the array of colourful and interesting characters that he meets along the way that makes it so good.

There’s Lydia, his unintended companion on the bus journey to England. She clearly fancies him and often has to bail him out of situations until he pushes her too far on that score. His job in the kitchen enables him to find some lodgings at the house of an Irish chap called Christy. He’s a bit of an alcoholic, who’s estranged from his wife and Daughter but later he remarries to an Indian woman. Lev buys himself a mobile phone so that he can keep in touch with his best friend back home, the volatile Rudi, who works as a taxi in this temperamental second-hand American Chevy.

There are other great characters in Lev's kitchen, among them his flamboyant ‘chef’ G.K. Ashe, a hard man to work for but one who develops a soft spot for Lev. We also meet the oddball selection of residents at the nursing home Lev visits on Sundays and eventually cooks for. Once things go a bit awry in London, he decamps to the countryside to work for another larger than life character Midge, the Suffolk farmer, who hires him as a picker.

Then there’s the reason things go awry in London, Sophie, a chef in G.K. Ashe's kitchen. Lev, who despite being my sort of age has no problem pulling the younger women and he falls for Sophie big time. She lifts his life out of its state of tedium and makes everything worth living for, for a while. He adores her plump arms and Lenny the lizard tattoo. He even puts up with her liking for rough sex, well you would wouldn’t you. Suddenly he's forgotten the haunting memories of his dead wife. He becomes totally obsessed with her. Ultimately though, he does not have the social status she craves and when they fall out, he loses his job and ends up working the fields in Suffolk. Now all his haunting memories are of Sophie.

Eventually he realises what he wants to do, particularly now that he has found out that his old village is to be destroyed to build a new dam. He returns to London, holds down two jobs at once and raises enough money to take the road home and realise those dreams.

A highly recommended read (or listen).



The old legs still ache but seem to be returning to life a bit as I ride home. Perhaps after a quick rub down they’ll be up for the long walk to the Victoria. We don’t have much choice though, I’m not sure we’d get MD into our local after last time and the altercation with the greyhound.

We had pondered going down to Scruffys for their reopening night but Friday is known as the dogs' night out, so we’ll defer our trip there. Scruffys was once one of our favourite haunts, until it went upmarket, became totally un-scruffy and then closed. It’s good to have it back, I hope, we haven’t seen the refit yet.