A Merlin Shaped Hole.

There are a couple of Blips missing; on Wednesday, I went to a very good talk about bee diseases. The original lady booked for the event needed some planned surgery so one of her underlings was an emergency stand-in. It was a very accomplished talk that pleased both the old hands and a couple of local youngsters (a relative term) who had never been near a bee before but found out about us from the village Facebook page. I did take a photograph, but decided that its artistic merit didn’t justify its entry into the Blip annals.
 
Yesterday’s daytime happenings are now lost in the mists of time and were obviously uninspiring. But, late in the evening, we suddenly thought we were dogless. Merlin had asked to go outside for a minute and, half an hour later, we realised that he hadn’t come back; Mrs TD was convinced he must have fallen in the pond so I put my shoes on and found a torch to go out and check. As I opened the back door, he staggered in leaving a trail of dirty water and footprints all over the kitchen floor. This morning, we found this hole in the ice over the pond where he had gone in, and we are surprised that he managed to climb back out; it must have taken a considerable effort for a creature of his infirmity to manage such a feat. Normally he only goes as far as taking his essential components over the threshold, spending several seconds using them and then coming straight back into the warm; unless, that is, there is some bird food left on the lawn. We never feed birds on the pond, even when it is frozen, so why he should go there, and why Herself should think he had, remains a mystery
 
In a little under four years, he’s had a twisted gut which demanded that a vet see him in the wee small hours to stick a needle into his stomach to deflate him, he’s eaten a tennis ball that required emergency treatment at a similar hour of the day to remove all of the pieces, he’s fallen over a cliff and, now, he’s fallen into the pond. If he were a cat, he would still have five lives left, but he isn’t.