That Sort Of Day

A bit of neat organising today. There is a Leamington Dog Show, which obviously isn’t in Leamington as dogs shows never are in the home town of the organising club, but is somewhere relatively close and it’s also the same day as the Kenilworth Running Festival. Both events are in spitting distance, that's a slight mega exaggeration, of Warwick University and therefore Son. Naturally we expected Son to scupper these carefully made plans by being in Nottingham that weekend but no, he’s there.

So I drop L off in Kenilworth for her 10k, then the boys and I go off to find where in Leamington the dog show isn’t.

The run turns out to be 3 laps... nice. Five hills per lap, even nicer. They’ve even managed to get a team from Warwick Uni to enter but no sign of Son turning out for them. Bit early for him. He won’t even be alive at this sort of time, unless he’s not gotten to bed yet.

I locate the dog show at Hatton Country World, which is all farm animals and craft shops. Oh and collies. Unfortunately the agility field has uncut grass and loads of pot holes. So it’s going to be more like a cross country run than a dog event and I best be careful, I don't want to injure myself for the Manchester run tomorrow.

MD has the morning, all three of his runs are up first thing. We stumble around the terrain that makes up his first course but the run is aborted when the wind blows half the jumps down. I have a feeling it's going to be that sort of day.

We start again and have a few poles down. Although I’m sure it must have been hard for MD in that long grass, what with him being such a short a**e. I survived the pot holes on the course, though to be fair, by now they’d filled most of them in and then put my foot down a huge one whilst walking to the next ring.

Our first event was called ‘Circular jumping’ but it isn't remotely circular. It was very twisty and tricky. I opted to enter MD in this and not Doggo because it was supposed to circular e.g. = easy. What we get is a course that would have very much suited Doggo but doesn’t MD at all. Oh well.

MD’s 2nd run is excellent but then he spoiled it by coming out the weaves. I did them with him on my right and he doesn’t like that side but he has to learn, it would have been much slower to have swapped sides. He does them fine 2nd time. Still a good run.

He has the first pole down on his last run. Which was a shame because the rest is clear and quick. I reckon we’d have been 4th had he not had that pole but then probably half the field could say something similar. So nothing for MD and it's over to the old man after lunch.

L has done her run. Not the quickest apparently and she was muttering something about bloody hills. She's probably saving her quick one for tomorrow. She then heads off to meet Son, who agreed to meet her, albeit briefly between getting up and the FA Cup Final. Well a student has to eat.

Doggo goes clear in both his runs and we twiddle our thumbs waiting to get pushed out of the places before we head off to find whatever watering hole Son has left L in, now that the match has started. Surprisingly they're not in Varsity having a ‘dog bowl’ meal but the ‘Dirty Duck’ instead. L does get about.

Amazingly we don’t get pushed out on both runs and Doggo gets a 7th place rosette.

Tonight, just a couple of naughty small glasses of wine to go with that pre-race pasta meal. Manchester tomorrow.

(Saturday 14th May)