No sorry it was a dog. It looked suspiciously like our granddog Reggie who is coming to stay with us for a week from this Wednesday.
I'm a strange person (we already know that I hear you say). No I'm a strange person when it comes to dogs.
Anyone who has seen me with a dog would say that I'm a dog person. I have a tendency to get down on my hands and knees and bark. Then when a dog comes round I do the same.
I seem to like playing with dogs and winding them up and they seem to like me as well. So why is it that I have no wish to have one?
I guess it goes back to childhood when we had a small poodle. It wasn't cool for a teenage boy to be seen with a small poodle. Now of course it doesn't matter but in those days it somehow did. I needed some kind of street cred. So I don't think I ever took this animal for a walk. It was a vicious little thing and totally protective of my mother. This dog would growl and snarl if anyone went within yards of her. So it hardly endeared itself to me. Then when it had to have teeth removed it could give you a nasty suck.
Now it seems everything seems to get crossed with poodles because of their calm temperament. How times have changed. We are surrounded with dogs. There's Reggie whom I have already mentioned. He's black and fluffy and always looks to be smiling as his lower lip doesn't quite cover his teeth, giving him a comical look. He loves having a treat and his special treat is this horrendous stuff that looks like bacon and is supposed to be duck but which I suspect is neither. It's almost impossible to break into pieces but he loves it.
Reggie is still quite young and taking him for a walk is tough. He pulls and then stops to smell everything. And as for weeing. Well we can't go more than a few yards before he cocks his leg. He's a cheeky chap as well. He will steal socks and anything else he can get hold of and sit there looking at you and then run off when you approach. Last week he got hold of a hairbrush. The problem is he often steals things that it wouldn't be good for him to swallow. He's just a cheekyoid (that's another word I've made up).
Beau is our other granddog through our eldest son. She lives in Eastbourne (that's beau and not eldest son, although he does live in Eastbourne as well). Oh dear I'm getting tied up in verbal knots today.
I like Beau a lot. She is the best catcher of a tennis ball I've come across (dogwise that is). She is also very friendly and a real people dog apart from when she sees somebody on a scooter or skateboard and then she goes nuts.
Then there's cousindog Casper who is just a fluffy ball of fun from start to finish. He runs around like a whirling dervish. Has anyone ever seen a whirling dervish?
So why is it I don't want a dog of our own.
1/ they are a tie and you have to think about whether they can go certain places.
2/ they need to be walked when perhaps you don't need to be walked.
3/ I hate it when they get ill or injured
4/ I hate picking up poo.
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One of the benefits of writing a daily diary is that you have a full record of every day. That's why and how I know exactly what happened 47 years and one day ago.
We had three different church ministers officiate at our wedding - two of whom I was happy with and one I wasn't.
Being a Methodist, the logical place for the other threequarters to get married was in the Methodist church in her home town of Knottingley in West Yorkshire. But the actual church had been knocked down and the church hall was used for services.
So instead we chose the Church of England parish church. As it was technically a Methodist wedding we had the Methodist Minister (more about him later). Then we also had to have the local Rector The Rev Stuart Pearson. I remember his name as it was the same as a professional footballer of the time. Then we had another Methodist Minister who was a friend of the other threequarters when she was studying at the University of East Anglia.
We met with Stuart Pearson in the days leading up to the wedding and chatted to him mainly about cricket which was a shared passion. Mike Wedgeworth we also knew from his days at the UEA.
As mentioned I wasn't too happy with the local Methodist minister whom I won't name. He was responsible for the only time I have walked out of a church service through anger.
His sermon surrounded the evils of pop music and he actually cited the Beatles as an example. One of my hates in life is people who talk out of prejudiced ignorance and his comments were just too much for me. I left.
Nowadays stag and hen parties seem to go on forever. They often occupy a whole week or fortnight and are sometimes weeks or months before a wedding. The night before my wedding I went out for a quiet drink at a hotel and that was it.
Thankfully most of the people on our wedding photographs are still around although some have passed including both sets of parents.
After the service there was a reception at the Darrington Hotel and then some refreshments at Anne's home overlooking a cricket ground. It probably provided the cricketers with their largest attendance of the entire season.
Then we set off on the long drive to our honeymoon in Scotland whilst everyone else went home - my how times have changed.
My parents lost their way getting to the reception and so turned up late. No sat nav in those dates.
A friend and his wife went to the wrong church and stood at the back and it took them some time to realise they were in the wrong place.
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Yesterday myself and cousin Belinda went on one of our wanders. This one was to Wroxham which is broadly known as the Capital of the Norfolk Broads which is very confusing because cousin Belinda's surname is Broad and I thought she and husband Clive were the Norfolk Broads.
I have never greatly liked Wroxham. It's too busy and too noisy for me and yesterday it was too wet as well, although that wasn't Wroxham's fault.
We went in search of interesting local history for the Facebook page we do for the Norfolk Family History Society.
It was a short drive/walk to St John's Church at Hoveton. There's an argument about where Wroxham ends and Hoveton begins. There's a big set of shops which announce themselves as the largest village store in the world. The shops are known as Roy's of Wroxham despite the fact that they are technically in Hoveton. Then there's the question of how you pronounce Hoveton. Is it Hove ton or Hover ton? Nobody really knows.
We had a mooch around the church and the graveyard but it was just too wet to stay long.
Tomorrow I will pop on some photos and a bit about the church. If you want to see the full piece you can find it on the Norfolk Family History Society Facebook page. Just go onto Facebook and search for Norfolk Family History Society.
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Over the years I have had a number of guilty pleasures when it comes to music.
Tomorrow I will tell you about one of these following the death of a well loved British singer.