eBabe

Unless you were shouting at your own children at the time, you quite possibly heard me roar “EIGHTEEN POUNDS!!!” last night, loud enough to bring tears to the ears of all in the vicinity.
Through some fuckwittery, where I had left the eBay account open while trying, unsuccessfully, to find a dog basket of all things (such cruel reward for attention to that hell-hound), F10 had scuttled on to the computer. While I was washing up, he, in his own words, had “got carried away.” With the consequence that we were the lucky winners (the term sticks in the craw) of a Match Attax card of some tosser of a football player. Cristiano Ronaldo possibly.

I’d gone upstairs to review dog basket options and so the first I knew of the other arm of our eBay activity was the cheery ping in the inbox and the enthusiastic announcement, “Congratulations, You are the current highest bidder …” At that innocent point, the bid sat at £12 which was enough to cause major freak-out. I'd look back on that halcyon amount with fond envy.

I thwacked off a panicky e-mail to the seller, trying to retract the bid.

Ping! Went the inbox. “Congratulations, You are the current highest bidder …” and the chilling climb to £14.50.
What all this was telling me, my frazzled brain worked out, was that some other dozy sod out there was actually bidding against me – aaargh, what am I saying, against me? against him!! Salvation lay in his desire edging crazily higher even than “ours.” The seconds were counting down in that way that thrills when the wondrous thing might just be yours and that horrifies when, well, when the wondrous thing might just be yours. Needless to say, Salvation failed to give a toss.

Every cheque we write seems to be for the children as it is without factoring in frenzied sessions on the computer. Shoes, piano lessons, piano exams (£43 for T12’s Grade 4, an exercise in stress I’m too near to to relate but will settle for reporting that it was All Alright On The Hour and a bad dress rehearsal need not mean curtains). Then there's ju jitsu, ju jitsu grading, karate, karate grading, clarinet lessons, residential trips, Robin the Bloody Storyteller coming to school for a bloody Workshop, football, rugby. A cheque for next year’s school bus sits on the side not quite written – well, at £740, would you? And then there are the cars, March bringing longer evenings but also both lots of insurance, tax, MOTs and services.
Somehow this eBay money held the full weight of the current financial crisis. Crisis and impotence in a demonic marriage. Cash in one way freeflow. The builders may have gone, but another set of gannets flocks in, hovering for scraps. The demands are endless.

I rang eBay, my fingers skittering like fat sausages over the tiny keys. The menu option enraged, as you can imagine, until I was put through to someone with the requisite scant English who insisted on reading the full Welcome guff. We tussled through the conversation, my half being frantic to convey “retract! retract! retract!” his centring tiresomely on “username” and “postcode” and “first line of address”. Somewhere around here, E had to be dug out to “give permission” (God, I hate data protection) for me to speak to eBay which was an irritating irony and nothing but a time-spinner. For somewhere else around here, the bidding closed and we were merrily informed by eBay that the closing amount was £18. Plus 99p post and packing. Congratulations!
I flipped.

The seller woke up, now that it was all too late, and sent a barely literate response to mine littered with meaningless "...."s. Are these indicating thinking time, surely not; who knows:

“i have no right to remove it, this system is contorlled by ebay. i will ask bidder 2 whether he wants it. if he do not want it....you may be have to pay or you can contact ebay...because i have to pay the final value fee to ebay, i do not want to lose money....”

Yeah, right, lose money. Bless. Needless to say my reply featured more syllables, relentlessly middle-class to the end, Full Sentences R Us. Fighting an urge to scream, “lose money, you greedy bag! You’re getting £18.99 for an outlay of 40p, a stamp and an envelope, all because I was stupid enough to think the dog needed a new bed.” I sounded instead contrite and grateful for whatever help she could give me.

F10 was on the floor. He had rummaged in his money box and prised out a Christmas twenty which he forced on me.
He sobbed.
“I got carried away,” he said again, “I feel so ashamed.”
What can you do to a response like that but say, “It doesn’t matter. It’s only money.”
It’d better be a shit-hot card though.

i no longer know why I’m surprised, really

Lo, who is this crone who wanders near, leprous among the shadows, bleary and distressed and best to be avoided? Fresh from a Dickens slum, a look of bleak bewilderment crossing her smudged brow – lately blown in from the coal face. People whisper and point and shield their children. A deranged poor soul is she, in search of but a shawl, a basket of heather to unsettle the superstitious and perhaps extort a few quid in the doing (kerching!).
The sort of look to haunt the early hours, to wake from sweating, clutching the reality of sheets in hot grateful fists; but a glance in the mirror confirms the grim truth. This was no dream but me, following an unsuccessful session with DIY hair dye. Some rough old bit of grim mac is what I now call hair.
I mean, I hardly expected to morph into the simpering lovely on the box, not in 25 minutes, and luckily my fringe does conceal dark crimes against my hair line, but the Mind The Gap discrepancy between expectation and brutal reality is hard.
Hard, but cheap.
I think this particular box of disappointing lies set me back a fiver, whereas at a salon it can run to eighty pounds.
I sound like my father. That’s 1600 shillings. Sheesh.
It’s also a question of terms, some vocab-cocky copywriter’s “natural medium brown” is my “Crow Black: fit to scare the kiddies.” The children flinch, they flee from me that sometime did me seek…
Two weeks and it'll be brassy again, three and I'm back on the box, fiddling with the gloves, living in hope.

But meanwhile face the world I must, to walk the dog, a creature who is no longer the random flash of impetuous fur that has tortured our life for what seems like decades.
Instead, she stands mute and obedient.
When I open the door she waits, all but saying, “After you, love.” She does not barge between my legs, prompting an unseemly scuffle, where the lead whips across my skin, a domino effect of pain and rage and tears ensuing, laced with the adrenaline of failure. And once out, she is calm, not deranged, not displaying truly disproportionate joy in what is, let’s face it, a pretty dull walk round a field, and an unlikely trigger for such hysteria. No more is the walk a time of deep stress and unhappiness, my control freakery sent into freefall by Lolly’s jolly sociable ways, outstaying her welcome wherever she went.

For if the dog is the worst thing I have ever bought, then the zapper (aka obedience collar) is the best. Particularly when half price on eBay. And, whereas I’d love to lay claim to efficient training schemes, I must confess that this seismic shift in her behaviour is due purely to the detonator in my feverish sticky paw. My new best friend.

One session, lasting about 10 mins, and Lolly is TRANSFORMED. Say it loud, and it’s almost like thunder. Finally, I am the owner of a Good Dog and can pat her with a hearty laugh and say “marvellous” as if I mean it when talking about her.

The collar arrived, and seldom has a package been opened with more anticipatory thrill. No cross dresser on receiving his nipple tassels could have torn at the jiffy so eagerly. I fumbled with the strap, the box, the remote control with obscene joy. I all but used my teeth.
My busy hands were necessarily stilled for the 24 molar-gnashing hours it took to charge, time I used to attempt the instruction booklet, the bit of the process I’d rather busk normally. Or get E to read.
Page one tends to be fine in these things, then there’s a confusing set of diagrams where they try to convince you of 19 myriad functions, 17 of which you never tie down and, then, when the page is turned, all hell is let loose, all sense of sense obliterated while the words ‘input’ and ‘mode’ and ‘function’ and ‘interface’ make worryingly frequent appearances.
So normally I don’t bother but, better and better, since this kit has 3 buttons, just 3, one of which you don’t even need, then even I was able to read through to the end, read and digest: one for bleep and one for zap. Yo.

The next day, I rubbed my hands with glee, and got me started.
I tested the zapper and found that level ‘one’ gave but a mild thrill, a bit like a TENS machine. This was marginally disappointing, since I’d hoped for something more industrial; but not disappointing enough to risk testing ‘eight’ on myself. Ho ho, no. Stupid I am not. Eight could wait for dark days with Lolly. There would be plenty.
I strapped her into her kit, very Hannibal Lecter Wears Bomb. A most pleasing sight, a physical embodiment of ME being in charge. Me, Lolly, not you.

Look at her now, an unwitting (naturally, hello? she’s a dog AND she’s blonde) suicide bomber. She’s still unaccountably pleased with herself but I let it go, despite regretting the long chat which we’ll never have, when I could put her straight on that particular little myth.
If dogs spoke English life,would be a good deal easier, “Lolly, you are very, very dim,” I could say, “there is nothing to be proud of in your helter-skelter ways...”
Instead, I take comfort where I can. Well, you've got to.
So the flashing box is tied tight beneath her chin, tight as an old bag’s head scarf.
It works.
It works so well I could weep.
The thought that it might malfunction, to boot, and blow the dog sky high in wonderful random bits is the stuff of giddy dreams; greedy maybe, but it sure does lighten the step. There’s nothing like a bomb at a dog’s throat to cheer one up.

So I have been feeling sort of benign towards her, and sort of smug with myself for having sorted things out (albeit employing vast expense and electrocution) which was a damnfule thing to do and shows me how one never learns and should certainly never think that things are going well.
Oh no.
For the doorbell has only just this minute gone, as I was typing this, skewing the balance of my blog and making it too long, for it was the chap from the local shop.
I had thought that my newly surprised hair was the main arrow in the quiver of current cock-ups: I was wrong.

I half shut the door in his face, not able to bear a renewed session of chat about his teeth (“Dropping. Like bits from a glacier. Six of them. I’m on medication”) when I noticed a loathsomely familiar beast at his legs, grinning away with misplaced confidence, half bouncing on stiff woolly legs. “Hoiiii!”
“In!” I hissed, using my best steel-capped slippers as a means to guiding the hound sharpish with speed, holding the door firm meanwhile to keep shop man well and truly out.
The “In” will never apply to him: the last thing I need is a man on medication missing half his teeth.
“So sorry,” I muttered, which loosely translates as Bloody Hell I Hate That Dog.
“Peugeot nearly got her,” he said, rubbing it in.
Damn, I thought
“How nearly?” I said
He held up his hands to illustrate the gap – a few, cruel, fisherman’s centimetres – between us and a dog-free house. Life sucks sometimes.
There’s always next time, I thought, dredging up optimism from deep despair, such is habit.
“Oh well,” I said, “Lucky, huh.” When you live round here you have to pretend to care.
“She was on the mother-in-law’s bed yesterday. In the bedroom.”
“What? Upstairs?” I squeaked, thinking: little soft paws on grimy gritty sheets, yuk!
“Upstairs,” he confirmed, in a way that can only be described as threatening.

My second fear was more real – sod the paws, she can lick ‘em clean – that this uninvited entrée, this furry surge, to Upstairs, somehow suggested that I might have to pay him something. Compensation, say.
I wanted to thwack into touch the gleam of dry cleaning bills lurking hungry in his eye.
Surely I make more than my fair share of unnecessary purchases from the shop to assuage my guilt at Lolly’s horrid interest in the white mice and sherbet puffs? When you’ve seen where that face has been the last thing you want is to buy sweets for your children seconds after she’s been rummaging, giving them the lusty once over. Just the thought is enough to regret not having installed a chair in the porch for recuperative purposes.
Lolly may have misjudged the mother-in-law for me - the ancient being does even better crone than I do, being the real thing. I smoothed a hand through my fearsome locks.
Shop man took flight, and backed away down the path, as if noticing the hair for the first time.
Five pounds well spent.

What that dog really needs now is manacles. Something desperately hard-core. Dog drugs maybe.
I was hopelessly naïve to trust in a mere collar alone.
But are they legal? Will I be arrested for simply typing in “incarceration methods” to eBay – dare I risk “inquisition techniques”? Is there a cyber keystroke police out there?
How much more, oh Lord, must we suffer with this dread dog, this greasy bag of fur? How very bad must I have been in a former life.
And if it’s not Shop Man, it’s Grim Duo from next door, ferrying Lolly back on an ostentatious lead bought for this purpose alone muttering about boundaries.

No wonder my mantra is Think Gin.
Meanwhile, what I can do, I will do, which is to wear a hat and turn the zapper wheel up to 8. We must take our pleasures where we can. Revenge is a dish best eaten whenever possible.
See who’s laughing then, dog. Mwah ha ha.