usual beagle dynamics x 1000

As Millie is on the mend - the leg is obviously quite itchy but very sensibly when she is restrained from doing anything about it she seems able to put it out of her small but actually quite orderly mind - she is finding it more and more frustrating to be cooped up inside, where she has to be mainly because she has to keep her wound dry so it continues to 'scab up' and crystallise or whatever other gross terms the vet can come up with. She is 10 but she is a pretty lively 10 (I am not thinking about Bo Derek - stop putting your tawdry sex fantasies onto my dogs). It's not that she doesn't love the idea of sleeping most of the day, it's just that when she's awake she wants to be really awake. It suxs. About this time next week she should be fine to do whatever she wants, apart from busting through the fence and being hit by another car. What I would really like to do at the moment is wash her, as she totally stinks.

Charlie meanwhile has ramped up her anxiousness into full-on antisocial behaviour, monster-puppy basically. Frenziedly ripping things up. It's going to be a gruelling week.

I was lucky enough to get a late birthday present from my inestimably talented and marvellous friend Toby. It is a painting of Charlie and I have to say it captures her angst stunningly.



He didn't ask me to and may even find it embarrassing but I want to tell you you can commission Toby to do a portrait of your pet at a very reasonable price. Have a look at some of the others he's done here. I couldn't imagine a better kind of pet painting. They are beautifully composed but spirited, so they're not tacky or maudlin at all, which I am sure is usually the danger.

toby time

Yesterday when Millie and I were at the vet's (she is having something that looks like a small brain removed from her ear next week) we encountered a 14-year-old terrier with a skin rash called Toby. It must be quite a rash to have its own name but there you go. Today I got a text from Toby Dutton asking if I was on campus and two seconds later a phone call from Toby Creswell asking if he could interview me for Great Aust Albums series II. I mean wow if I encounter one more Toby in this 24 hour period I think I will just plain toby out.

how are megastars created?

Megastars are created by the people needing someone to argue over that everyone knows something about (or think they do). Last night at Suze's 36th I had two conversations/arguments about Hendrix and Dylan. It's almost embarrassing, actually, you know what? It is embarrassing. I have no interest in either of these figures. I felt like I was being untrue to myself anyway by pursuing the line that I prefer Donovan to Dylan (which I do, but that's fairly irrelevant; neither of them really thrill me) because it was such a hacky way to go. What I would really like to do is erase the whole debate (or wait until that increasingly unlikely event transpires: that I suddenly get why Dylan is a genius, on a visceral/emotional/immediate rather than a theoretical level). And then, for god's sake, Hendrix, a debate inspired by the fact that someone had played a 20+ minute version of Voodoo Chile on RRR as part of a series of 'classics' (yes, that's what we need public radio for - to play all the songs commercial FM has been flogging for the last quarter of a century but without ads). Not that commercial FM would have touched this Voodoo Chile, it was a National Lampoon comedy record of everything that was bloated and foul about the music of the late 1960s, and like all National Lampoon comedy records, not funny. (Unlike the National Lampoon horror records).

I suppose that everyone also has an opinion on Britney Spears I should have steered the conversation in that direction, because I would have liked to know what that opinion was, though frankly I couldn't give a loose root about her either.

Toby and Suze's house is excellent. A yellow brick 1930s-1950s (???!!!) bungalow on a strange shaped block of land, it has those beautiful deco ceilings and fireplaces. It costs them so much money to rent that the landlord will go straight to hell, but show me a landlord who won't, property being theft and so on.