Blimey, we had a mad day yesterday. Our big man is off to his new home tomorrow - in Italy! J has connections with greyhound rehoming organisations all over the place and it just so happens that some of her charges are off to live the dolce vita in sunny Italy, and Luigi (well named as it turned out) is off to get a nice suntan on that bald pink tummy of his.

The only trouble is, he didn’t have his pet passport ready, so yesterday was an endless round of last minute vet visits, faxes, then a rather farcical trip into Dublin to pick up said passport. Hubby and I are rubbish at Dublin driving, so I printed out a road map off the internet, and he took the wheel. The rest of it went something like this:

Me: ‘Take a left here’
Hubby: ‘but it says right to the city centre’
Me: ‘well my map says left’
Hubby: ’sod that, I’m going right’
Me: ‘oh great, now we’ve fallen off the end of my map’
Hubby: ‘well why didn’t you print off the next bit?’
Me: ‘because I printed off a map of DUBLIN, and now we’re going to bloody Lucan!!…’ (repeat as necessary)

Still, we got there eventually whilst narrowly avoiding divorce proceedings and ended up asking a very nice lady from Northern Ireland (I was SO tempted to ask her to say ’situation’ for me - I love the way they say that on the news) for directions and found, embarrassingly, that we were actually where we wanted to be already. We parked up and walked past Leinster House, the seat of the two Houses of the Oireachtas (National Parliament), comprising Dáil Éireann (the House of Representatives) and Seanad Éireann (the Senate). There, don’t say I never teach you anything. We kept our eyes peeled to see if we could see Bertie (J says he smells lovely), but no luck, sadly. The building is fab and houses the National Library and National Museum (stored for another day for somewhere interesting to bring the boys). Further up Kildare Street we finally found the Department of Agriculture, where (cutting a very long story rather short) we emerged victorious with a rather fetching blue pet passport for Louis and J’s other two fellas. Now there’s just the saying goodbye to be done, and I fear that the rest of yesterday is going to seem like a breeze compared to that.

No Comments »