I knew yesterday was going to be a bad day when Bob, the new puppy, shat on the floor three times before 9am. And things just got even better after that, as he discovered a fun new game called ‘weeing on the floor and then dropping a toy in the puddle’. That was a delightful game. I really enjoyed that, especially when he did that four times within ten minutes- so as I was fishing a pissy toy out of one puddle and mopping up, he was doing the same thing again behind my back. Pee soaked tennis balls and squeaky tigers had not really featured in my delightful Vision of my adorable puppy, and the snuggles and cuddles and japes and frolics we would have.

I sorry I put Tiger in the wee wee, Mummy…

Rather, I may have had a notion of bicycling to the local shop on the slightly rickety* but extremely Instagrammable vintage bicycle my friend gave me (actually proper vintage, it was her mother’s), with me wearing a floral tea dress and straw hat, and the puppy sitting nicely in the wicker basket, perhaps sharing it with a baguette and some wild flowers I had picked, because apparently in the Vision I live in France. I do not know why I even entertained such a notion**, as prior to Bob I have tried to cram two other Border terriers into that wicker basket, and they have both objected strenuously, and I’m pretty sure Bob will do the same.

I did at least achieve the flowers in the basket part of the Vision.

Life never turns out how you envisage it though, does it? When my daughter was a baby, I didn’t really have any idea what she would be like when she was older, because the baby stage seemed to have no end in sight and I was firmly convinced that this would be my life FOREVER MORE now, so it was quite a shock when she started playgroup and I realised that she would grow up, and go to school, and leave home and I could enter a world again where I never had to watch the bastarding Tweenies. My son, based mainly on his prodigious appetite, I thought would turn out to be a strapping rugby player. He loathed rugby from the first time he was forced to play at school, and indeed holds a healthy contempt for all team sports, which shouldn’t surprise me, as he comes by it honestly.

Being a writer isn’t quite how I imagined it either. I thought it would involve a lot more titting about importantly and saying clever things to impress people, but the majority of the titting about comes in a more literal form as I try to convince myself that I should really put on a bra to uphold some minimum standards (literally and figuratively), even though I will spending the day crying in front of a laptop and not seeing or speaking to anyone else as I have yet again procrastinated dreadfully and have a deadline looming. I do feel a slight smug sense of achievement though, that I have not yet sunk to the depths of Victor Hugo, who procrastinated so much over The Hunchback of Notre-Dame that he had to get someone to lock all his clothes away, so he had no choice but to stay in and crack on with it. The ‘yet’, of course, is the key part of that sentence

There are advantages to things never turning out as you think they will though. I spend a lot of time imagining terrible, dire things happening to my nearest and dearest, and days out frequently involve black daydreams about the house burning to the ground because I have left my hair straighteners on. Since, as Cassandra Mortmain also wised observed in I Capture the Castle, the things you imagine never come true, by imagining these things happening, they cannot then actually happen and so by envisaging my husband being hit by a bus, I am in fact saving him from that fate. I suspect he would be less convinced by my reasoning behind why I spend so much time thinking about ways he could die unexpectedly, if he were ever to know. Luckily he is unlikely to venture into the dark web of Substack, as he mistrusts any use of the internet that does not involve gadgets.

Alas, despite my best attempts to ward off doom, even one as pessimistic as I cannot foresee every possible outcome, and so life still shocks and surprises. Because the only thing you can be sure of in life is that it won’t turn out as you were expecting.

*By ‘rickety’ I mean ‘doesn’t entirely go’.

** I blame Felicity Cloake’s Cairn terrier, Wilf, who sits beautifully and very Instagrammably in her bike basket as she cycles round London, thus setting impossible standards for other terriers across the land.