Doggy telepathy

Home alone on New Year's Eve, the first time for several years I think. Perhaps the millennium was the last time I was sitting by myself in England on the last night of the year. But Julia and Peter expect to be home well before midnight, actually it is a real treat to get a quiet shower and just relax for an hour. I'm really going to have to learn to pace myself to survive these next three weeks of hard work. They say that moving is the most stressful thing you can experience apart from the loss of someone close to you. I don't rank it THAT exceptionally, but I can feel all kinds of pressures.

As usual Hector has gone and curled up on the sofa in the conservatory to wait for his mistress to return. Even if Julia is away for the whole week travelling in Europe that is still where he spends his days, waiting for her to come back in through the door. Doggy total loyalty, don't knock it. I was listening to a programme recently on Radio 4 where they were talking about some experiments in telepathy using dogs. Very convincing. They had a closed circuit television camera trained on the dog at home and took the owner to some hotel several miles away. Then at a certain stage during the day they told the owner that she could now drive home again. As soon as she started to move the dog, visible on the CCTV tape, stirred, yawned and stretched and began to look excited. He already knew she was returning. Certainly Hector always gets excited a couple of minutes before Julia turns up - I had it down to his sensitive ears picking up the sound of the car engine in the distance but maybe it is telepathy of a kind.

At three o'clock this afternoon I was painting the house but I took a break to phone Edera and wish her a happy New Year - something that arrives in Japan nine hours before it comes to Britain. She had already gone to bed but she wasn't asleep. Seems that snow has arrived in Japan too, but not in leafy Chiba-ken. I quite miss the old place, having two homes on opposite sides of the globe will take some thought, a lot of thought. It feels good AND it 'ain't simple. Even as I write this we have two hours of 2009 to run in Lancashire but this blog will pick up the date and time from the Japanese settings and get dated 2010.

Well, Happy New Year to all 'Little House' readers anyway, whether you are in front, behind or even eavesdropping from some other planet.