Hi, Scratch Face!

You’ve heard of the cost of living crisis, right? Well, I’m currently in the middle of a cost of living with a canine crisis.

Several developments came to pass last week – not all of them fiscal – but I was left with feeling like a bit of a fool. Where to begin? At the beginning, I suppose.

First of all the Queen died (RIP) and that meant that the pet food shop closed for the bank holiday and wouldn’t you just know it, but Waffle needed dog food.

“No bother, lad. Sure, any shop sells dog food nowadays, hi. Is your eyes painted on or wha’?”

Alas, if that were only the case.

I think I have mentioned as much in the past but Waffle has a fairly serious allergy shtick going on at the moment. When I say ‘at the moment’ I mean, of course, always and forever more.

This manifests itself in various serious and nefarious ways, most pertinently when he eats something that isn’t prescribed, his ears break out in a rash. This means that he’ll scratch the lugs off himself trying to ditch the itch. That means that I start off being sympathetic with his plight (“Oh, wee Waffie, that looks really bad,”) but eventually I end up being the one doing the barking (“Hi, Scratch Face! Cut that ship out!”).

Without boring you with the whole scratchy-grumpy tale, Waffle has previously needed multiple visits to the vet’s when he’s been eating things he shouldn’t and of course, before we cottoned onto the fact that he should be as picky as a vegan at Fatty Arbuckle’s big brother Clarence’s barbecue steak-out. The problem is, he’s far from picky and so we have to keep him on a tight rein in terms of what he’s gobbling up on a daily basis.

His daily meals consist of one kind and one kind only, of dog food: Life Stage Grain Free Trout and Salmon and so far, it’s the only type of canine grub we can find that doesn’t have him pulling the lugs off himself and then me barking, “Hi Scratch Face!”

However when the Queen said goodbye to her beloved Corgis and when the bank holiday meant the whole world closed, Waffle ran out of Life Stage Grain Free Trout and Salmon. Emergency!

Short of breaking into the pet shop in question (I admit that the thought did cross my mind – but only for a second; if I’m to be breaking into a business for personal gain, it’s not going to be a fupping pet shop – I’m not a complete headcase), the only other option on the table was fish (as well as trout and salmon, he can also eat tuna).

Short of going fishing (which again, I did consider briefly but ultimately decided against – anything to save a few pound), I was forced to shell out some of my galactically hard-earned cash on tins of over-priced tuna – four tins, to be exact. If you’ve bought tuna recently, you’ll know this stuff doesn’t exactly come cheap any more and so the cost of feeding the hound for two and a bit days cost me almost as much as a bag of stuff that keeps him going for a fortnight. Bad times.

The day after the bank holiday and after I had stocked up on a six month’s supply of Life Stage Grain Free Trout and Salmon (just in case we’ve another bank holiday in the offing with another royal passing; that no sweat shtick thing Andy has going doesn’t sound healthy), I was settling myself in for an afternoon of working from home when the Hound sprang onto the sofa and started making a comfy bed for himself. This resulted in an immediate verbal dressing down from yours truly, via a lurching to my feet, a shaking of my fist and a warning that him and his doggy mates from down the road might be planning the canine equivalent of a bank holiday of their own. To his credit, Waffle received the message with a prompt slinking from the sofa and retiring to the corner of the room to eye-ball me morosely.

You see, as per the house rules, while Waffle is permitted inside said house these rules exclude the clambering onto sofas or the languishing on beds. And that was precisely why I had almost choked on my tea when His Hairyness decided the sofa had suddenly become his new bed. Conscious that he had already cost me a small fortune in tuna, this new presumption the he could utilise the soft furnishing as he saw fit, was the last straw.

“Don’t even look at me, dawg! You know you’re not allowed on the sofa. People who don’t wipe their butts aren’t allowed to sit on sofas about here. You don’t even wear pants, for Fintona-sakes! No, no, no – don’t even look at me!”

My huff lasted until the little humans arrived back from school. Faster than I could say, “You’re wan hateful H, dog,” I came across the scene you can see in the picture. Unbeknownst to me, any time my back was turned, the hound had been reclining on sofa at the behest of the aforementioned little humans. He was even being used as a snugly teddy bear. And as you can see from the photo, some of those little humans don’t give one fig about the aul fella complaining about dogs on sofas. Bad times.

These bad times were consequently exacerbated the next day when I discovered the feckless fool shoulder-deep in a bag of tomatoes that had somehow been dropped when I was ferrying the groceries the short distance from the car to the house. “Hi Scratch Face!” was the least of what he got at that instant.

Potentially (it can take a while for the eating of a non-prescribed food stuff to translate into ear rash and Scratch Face admonitions), I might have paid for the expensive tuna in vein and I’ll still have to take the hairy clown to the vet’s for another dose of ear medicine or steroids or whatever the latest brand of snake oil has become a la mode.

*sigh*