Those of you who have read my posts before, know several things about me: I am pretty old, I won’t travel on an airplane, I love being at home, and I have a dog.

What has the dog got to do with anything, you may ask. Well, in the foreseeable future, later on today, I plan to take the dog for our usual walkies. We will set off after the worst of the school-going-home traffic is out of the way and we’ll walk to the first corner. We may make several (or more) stops along the way so that Lola can have a good sniff to see which of her pals (or enemies) has stopped and she will leave a marker to say she has been to the same patch of weed, grass or pavement.

At the corner, we will stop and wait until we can be certain that we are not in danger of being ambushed by a rogue car or electric scooter, then I say ‘okay’ to Lola and we cross the road and go right, to the end. (The reason we cross there is that there is quite a large crack in the wall that holds back the tree and garden of the house on the other side of the road and I worry that it will collapse on us! I worry about stuff like that! – see my earlier post, Risk-Averse. Who me? Yes me!)

At the end of that short little road, we turn left and walk to the end. This part of the walk is different to the last bits – it has a small grassy bank on the left which Lola has to examine minutely for any trace of other animals, particularly, of course, dogs. It is along this path that she leaves most of her special signal mixture these days.

Until May this year, her spots of choice would have been on the following large area – a small grassed park-like piece of land that boasts a wooden bench set back near the wall separating it from the house and garden behind. At one time this piece of land was the site of a very useful (to me) bus stop – the nearest to our house and one of the penultimate stops of the numbers 8 and 9 bus from Canterbury. Sadly both bus routes were changed several years ago and the bus stop pole on the side of the road was removed.

In May we rounded the corner to find a mini digger had removed all the grass. I asked one of the men who was working there why and he told me that they were preparing the land to sow wild-flower seeds! How wonderful!

After that day Lola still, occasionally walked across the area sniffing out the scents of her allies but, in the last few weeks she hasn’t been able to walk there because there is the most beautiful growth of wild flowers! There are corn flowers, tall red poppies, little white daisies, big yellow daisies and some others which haven’t yet opened. In some places, the flowers are almost as tall as I am (just about 5 feet), in others they are about 3 feet tall.

At the end of that bit of road we again turn left and walk back home, carefully crossing one road and arriving home in a very short time. One thing that hasn’t happened, though I am always prepared (just in case) is that Lola has not gone ‘squatties’, (as my mother and grand-mother called it.) I believe her previous owner taught her that the best place to do that was always in her own back yard because that is her squattie place of choice, at all times. When we went to Center Parcs in February, she only went squattie once during the whole week, saving the rest till we got home!

That, my friends, is the only plan for travel I have!