Not normally a fan of getting cold or wet, Mrs Bitey nonetheless had a riotous time this weekend getting soaked to the skin in a very stormy shire.
The key ingredient was a gale force wind. As I have blogged before, blustery wind seems to hype up Mrs B and most of her canine compatriots.
Saturday was pretty wet and very windy but between showers, we managed a good romp around on Rodborough Common. We were in a minority. Only a few were out and about and it was blissful to be able to run around without the frosty stares of townie weekenders and their designer dogs- not a doodle or a poo in sight. A hardy few KIAs in study waterproof were rustling briskly, too cold to stop for the imparting of wisdom thankfully. One particularly amusing sight was a lovely black labrador who decided to leap into a cattle trough, ignoring the anguished cries of his owner, and sat defiantly in the water, only his head visible, enjoying the view and having a nice bath, despite the extremely cold blasts of wind. Rather him than me.
Sunday was another ballgame. The car rocked in the gale force wind and rain lashed against the car windows so hard that visibility was virtually impossible. Mrs B was undeterred and leapt out of the car, head first into a very deep puddle. However, after a cursory flap of her ears and shake down, she spotted her beloved ball on a rope and was jumping up and down making very insistent barks that I just throw the bloody thing.
The wind was savage. It battered against my hood rendering hearing anything else impossible. The rain was of the sideways, violent variety, stinging my skin and soaking my ‘waterproof’ jacket to a mere tissue of slack, soggy material stuck to my skin. I could feel my jumper soaking up the excess, my trousers were saturated and there was that cold drip of rainwater down the back of my neck. I abandoned the hood as it was not going to stay on my head and was in fact more hindrance than help. In fact, it’s fair to say that I bore more than a passing resemblance to the bathing labrador without going to the trouble of actually jumping into a trough.
Mrs B was keeping up a merry front, enthusiastically chasing after the ball and ducking and diving around the larger puddles. At one point the ball landed in an, until recently dry, dew pond, but she gamely waded in to fetch it without complaint. The wind blew her off of her paws several times but she was still able to show off her signature manoeuvre, the launch with all four feet off terra firma, a couple of times.
Apart from a couple of male KIAs and a daft townie bint in stiletto boots trying to stay upright and hold an umbrella, failing spectacularly on the latter, there was nobody about. Anyone with an ounce of common sense was tucked up in the warm at home.
We trudged and played ball for almost half an hour, me hunched against the blasting gusts, Mrs B slip sliding in mud, getting filthier by the second. The weather was unrelenting and it steadily got worse. The sting of the rain had blinded me with watery tears, I couldn’t hear a bloody thing and the common took on a whole new dimension when slick with mud and torrents of water rolling down the sides.
Amid all this extremis, there was only one thing left to do. I threw back my head and laughed hysterically. Once I started, I could not stop. Mrs B stopped to look at me with a quizzical look which melted into the dawning realisation of just how vile the conditions were, and turned on her heels, charging back to the car as fast as her little legs would carry her. She didn’t glance back once and neither did I as I half ran, half staggered behind her.
Once in the shelter of the car, wrapped in towels and stinking to high heaven of mud, rain and wet fur, both Mrs B and I had clouds of steam rising from our bodies. The whole car fogged up and so we sat in companionable silence with the heater on full blast, listening to the Archers omnibus and rocking gently in the wind, waiting for the steam to lift before heading home to dry out properly 
