I WOULD like to buy a pint for the people who alerted the RSPCA to the poor little animals who belonged to a mother, brother and daughter in New Lodge.
The story, reported, last week broke my flipping heart. A dog being forced to wear a cone for eighteen months to stop itself scratching its many flea bites.
For EIGHTEEN MONTHS.
The poor little mite. The most severe flea infestation an RSPCA inspector had ever seen, the most agitated and distressed they have ever seen a dog.
Can you imagine. And if they were bathing the dog in flea shampoo, I’m Claudia Schiffer. Fleas cause untold misery for animals – and guess what, they don’t just stay on the animal, they’ll jump on you too, breed in your carpets and their bites are brutal.
Scruffy because you can get rid of them, plenty of effective sprays for your home and tablets for your animals.
The dog and one of the two cats have since been rehomed and I hope they are living their best lives. Benny the cat is still waiting but he’s better off anywhere than there, I think you’d agree. Eight week prison sentences for them all. Why bother? Suspended for 12 months *throws hands up in air*.
A paltry fine thrown in even though the magistrates had described the case as one of ‘prolonged, serious and excessive suffering’.
The animal cruelty laws in this country are a joke. I looked the family up, as you do, to put a face to a name. I could only find ‘Janina Booker’. I wish I hadn’t because she’s now burned in my brain.
But my eyes were drawn to her profession: ‘cleaner’. I would have laughed if I’d had a laugh in me for this case, but I don’t. Not even one of irony.
We went up to have a nosey at the Fox House out on the road to Holmfirth which has been taken over by the same people who run one of our favourite scoffing places, The Dunkirk.
My it’s lovely. But then my brain started to spin about the last time I’d been here and the calculation was frightening. I last went through the doors of the Fox House forty-three years ago.
I’m not old enough to have been of drinking age 43 years ago! But I am. Part of my eighteenth birthday celebrations with my then boyfriend who dumped me for a trollop from Scunthorpe (they did inspire a poem with the same name so at least I got something out of it). The good thing is that it does seem like another lifetime ago. The scary thing about time passing is when something that happened twenty years ago feels like yesterday.
Blimey, the picture of ‘the Beast’ Mark Labbett in last week’s Chron took some getting my head around.
He’s so thin. Same way I felt about seeing recent pics of my wrestling crush Dave Batista who now looks like, dare I say it, Gary Glitter. I’m no longer interested. If he comes a-calling, I’ll just have to turn him down.
It’s entirely selfish of me to think that they both looked so much better as man mountains, boy that bulk suited them, because excess weight takes a toll on everything and they’ll both feel so much better for it.
This I know having lost a bit myself over the past year for health reasons and the benefits are magnificent.
But the older you get, a wise friend told me, the more you have to choose between ‘your face and your ar*e’. And if you lose the fat – the nature’s Botox – from your cheeks, sometimes you just have to swallow it for the better life choice.
