Midlife has revealed some of my greatest talents – cleaning up after dogs is one of them
Aged 54 and it’s not a skill I either anticipated having nor expected to have great pride in. But it’s something I can do, something I quite seriously excel in, and indeed my heart swells at the satisfaction it gives me. Although at its heart it is, frankly, horrendously disgusting, beyond belief revolting. And I really, really hope the opportunities for me to display this skill, to put it into action, are few and far between.
It goes like this. It’s about the worst wake-up call you can get. I’m a light sleeper so I stir at the first hint of noise. It’s a gurgling sound from the corner of the room, then comes a large belch, a deep cough then the sound of licking. It’s Cyrus. That I know. Our large, fox red lab, sleeps in the corner of our bedroom, on a large and comfy dog bed.
A Cyrus belch is not a pretty sound. It’s the dead of night, it’s sometime during Christmas, although a day or so after Christmas Day, and as I wake I feel a nasty dryness in my mouth, a foul taste and the distinct impression that given how much I drank the night before, I have not slept nearly enough to ease the burden of it.
I lie there for a couple of seconds and sniff the air, quite audibly. There’s another belching, groaning sound from the dog corner and this time it’s loud enough to wake my wife. “Oh my God,” she exclaims. “Cyrus.” “I know,” I reply. And before I have reached the switch for the lamp beside my bed, Cyrus is there, licking my face, his tail thumping against the side of the bed.
Now quite awake I’ve no need to sniff the air. The odour is obvious. Indeed the stench is horrendous. I get out of bed and experience that nastiest of sensations as a bare foot sinks into something soft and wet. “Oh my God,” I say, as I switch on the light. “Oh my God,” I say again as I look down at my foot and across to the corner of the room.
My first aim is to get Cyrus out of the house as fast as possible. And because I’ve stepped in it, that means hopping out of the room, and then hopping down the stairs, hopping down the hall and hopping to the door and shooing Cyrus out, then hopping back upstairs and into the bathroom and hopping to the bath so I can hose down my foot.
Then I set to the mission properly. A bucket, kitchen roll, a couple of cloths and a few tea towels. Back in our bedroom and my wife is, quite correctly, hiding under the duvet. This is fine. She need take no part in the proceedings. For when it comes to cleaning up dog sick and dog poo (and the thick and runny stuff, not a mere few dark solids, because Cyrus clearly must have added some non-regulation food items to his meal plan the day before) this is my time.
I shall spare you too many further details except to say that with nothing but an endless repeat of applying a wet cloth and squeezing it out, then finally patting every bit dry, after an hour I had the situation under control. I put my dressing gown in the wash, showered (showering feverishly like I’ve been exposed to radiation), and by 4.30am, having lit a scented candle, I was back in bed.
The next morning there was little to show except for some slightly damp patches. I hoovered over for good measure and 24 hours later, of that night’s calamity, there was no sign.
So I can safely say that when it comes to a properly nasty job like that I’m your man. I can identify the issue, I have the tools, I have the know-how. I can clear up dog mess and sick like the best of them. And I’m happy and proud of it. And I also clean up (at the end of every night, with no exceptions, sober, drunk or very drunk) kitchen surfaces with a similar panache and passion as I witnessed in David Beckham (as seen in the recent Netflix documentary), going over a cleared surface with a damp cloth and then again with squirts from an anti-bacterial cleanser spray.
As Liam Neeson might say: “I have a very particular set of skills.” And one day I hope I can extend these skills to other areas so that, for example, I don’t need to call in an electrician to change the bulb on a picture light.
