It is the first day of the holiday when I haven't needed my emergency trousers.
Not, I hasten to add, that I have developed winter vomiting disease; nor because I have picked up a debilitating food poisoning from too many clotted cream teas. Neither have I suddenly reached such an advanced stage of decreptitude that I must carry a bag carefully strapped beneath my trouser leg.
No, the emergency trousers are entirely the dog's fault.
On the first day - no, even before the first day. On the way down here, we stopped just outside Okehampton for a classy Little Chef lunch. I clipped the dogs' leads on, and took them to stretch their legs after their long incarceration in the car. Jip was over-excited. Jip was eager to climb the muddy bank. And having emptied her bladder, she was keen to climb back down again - and that was my undoing.
I felt my feet slip, slide, glide from under me in the mud. And suddenly, I was airborne. And then airborne no longer, but landing hard on my backside, rather in the manner of that skydiver off of the news who fell 20,000 feet with no parachute, and broke his leg.
I didn't break my leg, but I landed hard on my arse. I felt my vertebrae slither and slide and jolt into each other, like carriages in a cartoon train which doesn't want to slide off the broken rails and into the ravine. Pssshtickoff, Pssshtickoff, Psshtickoff. Ouch. My vertebrae stopped just short of actually piercing my brain, and I picked myself up, and looked down and behind me, at my mud caked posterior. Mud caked, and wet.
The next day, the children and I took the dogs walking on the moor. It is wet on Bodmin, this half term. Wet, windy and flooded. We walked and ran and climbed and conquered, and came home wet. In the evening, I took the dogs out again, on a crap-march. We crossed a small wooden bridge over the trout stream, and headed for the flooded ford. Just before we got there, we hopped back over the stream to get back to the road.
I say we. I mean, all of us except Jip. Jip who cannot jump. Jumpless Jip. She stood and shivered and shook and quaked and whined and cried and was generally helpless and pitiful on the by-now-far side of the stream.
So I heroically jumped back again, picked her up and prepared to re-launch. Midflight, Jip lost her nerve and wriggled. And I jiggled, to compensate for her wriggling. And like the old woman who swallowed a fly, I wriggled and jiggled and squiggled until my landing foot arrived on the far bank, but my following foot, dear reader, landed in the stream. Which was deep, up to my thigh. And cold. And not at all welcoming.
I am a little concerned that, at this rate, I won't have enough jeans to last the duration of our holiday. Which, lest we forget, is supposed to be quiet and relaxing. And not involving emergency trousers...
