“Why not? Dog won’t mind.”
“Iwill mind.”
“I do see his point, Judy.” Mum came to what, on a good day, might have been my rescue. “I would not want to have sex in front of a dog either. I had sex in front of Mick Jagger once and that was bad enough.”
Not my rescue, then. Some previously unknown pit of hell. “Back to me?” I suggested.
And, mercifully, Mum went with it. “You know I love you, mon caneton, but I think you may be making a molehill out of a teacup. It has only been two days, after all.”
“Yeah, but Oliver says if I keep messing this up, we’ll have to get rid of Spud.”
“Did he say exactly that?” It was the gentle voice Mum used when she was navigating my bullshit. “In exactly those words?”
“Well, no,” I admitted. “But Spud needs discipline and consistency and boundaries and…and everything. And I’m not doing that.”
“There is more than one way to skin a dog, Luc.”
I put my hands protectively over Spud’s ears. “Not the right phrase, Mum.”
“You know I love Oliver too,” Mum said. “But you are a person who makes molehills out of teacups, and he is a person who thinks it is his way or the autoroute. And that can be good because you will stop each other becoming complete arseholes.”
“Thanks, Mum.”
“I am complimenting you. I am saying you are not complete arseholes.”
“That implies that I’m at least some part of an arsehole.”
She shrugged. “Everyone is some part of an arsehole sometimes. But this thing with you and Oliver, he is not going to leave you just because you have a different philosophy on dog owning.”
“I would,” said Judy.
“Yes”—Mum glanced at her—“but Luc would not go out with you because he is a gay and you are very, very old.”
Judy slapped her chest proudly. “Geriatriccore. Old-girl aesthetic. Hashtag stillgotit.”
“I don’t have a philosophy on dog owning, though.” I yanked the conversation back on track. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“And, Luc, neither does Oliver. He is just better at covering it up than you are.”
“No but…” I squelched into a quagmire of my own inadequacy. “He’s, like, read all the dog books and things.”
“So what?” said Judy. “Never read a book in my life, dog or otherwise.” She snapped her fingers. “Michael of Kent, here, girl.”
And, sure enough, Michael of Kent bounced into view, hopped into Judy’s lap, and awaited further instruction.
“Good girl.” Judy pulled what appeared to be about a third of a chicken out of her pocket and fed it to Michael of Kent.
“Also”—Mum swivelled the camera away from the Judy/Dog/Chicken triad—“you do not have to be a barrister to read a book.”
“No, but you have to be, like, not lazy and hopeless.”
“You are not hopeless,” Mum told me. “And you are only lazy because it is easier.”
“Yeah. By definition,” I pointed out.
Mum struck a pose of smug wisdom that, to be fair, was at least moderately earned. “Ah, but is it easier now, mon caneton?”
Was there anything worse than the person you’d explicitly called for advice giving you the advice you’d explicitly called for? In the grand scheme of things? Probably. In the moment? Definitely not.
