Dave's dog

I said I wasn't going to talk about such things for a while, but as I was trying to get off to sleep last night, having downed 1 1/2 Senokot tablets, I suddenly remembered an incident from long ago involving the very same tablets.

Mr Grumpy has a nephew called Dave. The two of them are the spitting image of one another, though 20 years apart in age, and they get on extremely well. So when Dave, his 8-year old daughter, and Daughter's best friend, who was a rather posh and stuck-up young lady wearing her best pink taffeta princess dress, went to choose a new dog from the Dog's Trust, they stopped off on the way back to show him off.

He was a handsome young thing, a grey and white Australian cattle dog with black spots and one blue eye and one brown one. He bounded round the kitchen, snuffled his way across the floor, ate a biscuit and looked adorable. I had, of course, quite forgotten the accident I'd had with a plastic drum of tablets the night before, when, in wrestling the tight lid off, I'd sent a load of them up in the air and all over the floor. In any case, I'd swept them all up... or so I thought.

Halfway home, the pup was ill. Violently. From both ends. And he was sitting on the lap of the Princess Posh at the time. Dave rang up and said he couldn't understand what was wrong but the dog was all right now and had downed his dinner with no further mishaps. "Perhaps he gets travel sick," wondered Dave.

"Er..." said I, "I spilt some Senakots on the floor last night. I thought I'd swept them all up, but you don't think...?"

Dave DID think. We all shrieked with laughter, especially when he told us about the sobbing Princess Posh, covered in puke and poo. It wasn't fair of us to laugh. Well, not really. But honestly, it couldn't have happened to a nicer young lady!