This post has gone to the dogs

Is anyone else out there in desperate need for some comic relief? What a shitty week this has been so far. Almost every blog I have read seems to be full of sadness or stress or anger. Work is hard, too. We are approaching the time of my near disappearance during the festival, although as usual I will try to post short things and photos. This weekend is The Gathering, and people are arriving from all over the world to visit with members of their various clans. I am debating whether to brave the crowds and attend the parade of the clans on Saturday.

Let’s just have a story, shall we? Something ridiculous to make us laugh and not mind so much that the world is so strange. This tale was told to me by a girl I know, who heard it from someone else. As it turns out, the story is now at the “friend of a friend of a friend of a friend” level of transmission. It’s that funny.
The girl in question - let’s call her Amy - is in London, house sitting for a couple who are on holiday. She is also looking after their dog, a huge, ancient Alsatian that we shall call Dudley. Everything is going well, until Dudley up and dies.

Amy calls the couple at their hotel in France, and while they are not surprised that their geriatric dog has expired, they are concerned because they won’t be home for two weeks, and ask Amy to take the dog to the vet to be cremated.

Amy agrees, but afterwards realizes that it is going to be a more difficult task that she had first thought. She doesn’t have a car and as a student she can’t afford to take a cab. She decides she has no choice but to take Dudley with her on the underground. But how?

Finding a giant suitcase, she stuffs Dudley in it and begins the long journey to the vet office. She is terrified as she drags the heavy case through the tube station and imagines the zipper ripping open and Dudley’s stiffening corpse falling out in front of hundreds of commuters.

Finally she is on the tube, but when she gets out she is met with a long staircase leading to the exit. After watching her struggling over the first few steps, a young man asks if he can help her carry the case. She repeatedly declines, but he insists that he can’t stand by and watch her carry on like she is. She relents, and they chat as he hauls the case up the steps for her.

“What the hell do you have in here?” he asks as they near the top of the stairs.

“Oh,” says Amy, faltering. “My…boyfriend is a DJ. I’m taking him some of his equipment.”

At which point the once chivalrous man hoists the case above his head and runs for it, through the barriers and out of the tube station, leaving Amy open-mouthed with her hand out, not knowing what to call to make him stop.

Instead she sighs and turns to get back on the tube, leaving the man to trot triumphantly into the nearest pawn shop with his prime steal of dead dog.