Vets

I come out of my ayurvedic massage in Kerala all oily. I look like one of those sad birds you see sometimes after a tanker spill, feathers weighed down and shiny with gunk. Then I look at my phone. The point of my trip to India is to look at my phone less. The ayurvedic doctor has already told me that my doshas are out of balance and suggested that I should become less of a ‘go, go, go’ person. But I look at my phone anyway because I am a hopeless addict. I have five messages and four missed calls from the dog sitter. ‘Dennis found a sock and, before I could take it from him, he swallowed it whole. It looked small and he’s acting normal but I called the vet so they could tell me which emergency clinic I can bring him to.

Dennis refuses to step on to the scales at the vet. Perhaps he’s nervous about his holiday weight. The upshot is that I have to climb on the scales holding him, and then again without him, so the receptionist can work out the difference. It makes for quite a humiliating morning, shouting my weight across a crowded veterinary waiting room. A woman clutching an elderly cat looks determinedly at the floor. It’s our third trip to the vet in a week. Grass seed season is particularly bad this year, they say, on account of the heat, which has turned the seeds brittle and more likely to penetrate paws and ears. Local councils and their obsession with rewilding is also to blame, chunter some dog owners, since they’ve used this fashionable eco policy as an excuse not to mow.

The coming week will see the last major commemoration of a second world war anniversary – 80 years since VE-Day – which a handful of surviving veterans will attend. It is unjust that VJ-Day in August will attract much less attention, but so did the Far East campaigns, much to the contemporary chagrin of the ‘Forgotten Army’ in Burma. One of Bill Slim’s soldiers was George MacDonald Fraser, whom I knew and adored, as did millions of fans of his Flashman books. In his fine memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, George described how one May day in 1945, as his company lined out to attack a Japanese-held village, a green young officer ran out in front of them and cried ecstatically: ‘Men! The war in Europe is over!