Dog on a Cold Tin Roof

Do you sometimes get those evenings when things don’t quite pan out as you expected?

When you are sitting watching something on Netflix, kittens and knitting on lap (not a good combination but what can you do?), waiting for your husband to arrive home from the airport after working away and anticipating nothing more than a quick catch up on the week’s news and gossip and a rummage through his cabin bag to see how many tea bags and free range pork sausages he’s managed to bring home this time and definitely not anticipating any sort of drama.

Then….

THIS

got added to

THIS

AND THIS

and all of a sudden you have

SOMETHING LIKE THIS IN FRONT OF YOUR HOUSE!

Partly my fault, of course, as earlier in the evening Taz the elder Tialys dog was pushing and scraping at the door to be let out just as I had settled down for the aforementioned session of T.V., kitten petting and knitting.  So, being quite old and not quite as in control of his bladder as he once was and, safe in the knowledge we have worked very hard over the years to make our very large garden dog proof,  I put him outside and then promptly forgot about him.  After about an hour and a half Mr. T. arrived home from the airport fully suited up from his week in the office and was confused when he was greeted by two dogs instead of three.  Only then did I remember that Taz was still outside in the freezing cold.  Being 11 o’clock at night by this time we had to shine a torch around the garden and, eventually, picked up two glinting green eyes but, unfortunately, these points of light happened to be on our neighbour’s roof.  There was the dog, trying to keep his foothold pawhold on an icy metal roof – we could hear his claws scrabbling to keep a grip.

He must have got bored (and cold) and managed to get up on the conservatory roof by jumping up on the wall alongside of it, across the roof of our house and onto our neighbour’s newly renovated (hideous) red metal roof which, of course, being smooth and icy, once trodden on and descended (probably by sliding down) couldn’t be climbed back up again.  (see below for sophisticated plan of dog’s progress)

Mr. T quickly went inside to change into more suitable clothing, I ran next door to the neighbour and Mlle. Tialys was dragged from her computer game to ring the Pompiers (firemen).

In the end, Mr. T and the neighbour – with whom we were not actually on speaking terms by the way (but that’s another story) got up on the roof next to the slippy metal one and managed to throw a tarpaulin across it and encouraged the dog up to the ridge where I then guided him with the torch back over to the conservatory roof where he could jump down to earth again.

Then the Pompiers turned up!

They were left only with the job of shining very bright torches on the roof to guide Mr. T and the neighbour down safely and to have a good laugh.  I suppose it made a change to get a call asking for help to get a dog down from a roof rather than that old chestnut – a cat stuck up a tree.  They will probably be round very promptly this year for their Christmas box!!

This is the silly old twonk who caused all the drama and, as I explained to the Pompiers, he has enough trouble getting up on to the sofa these days so what possessed him to go roof climbing I can’t imagine.

Still, the evening ended well, nobody was hurt, the ice was broken with the neighbour so we are ‘sort of’ talking again and there were three packs of Waitrose’s finest pork sausages in the cabin bag.