By Adele Cosgrove-Bray

Flossie’s a lovely little dog. Dead-friendly, like. A rescue dog. When she was a pup, she’d got a great big hernia all along her tummy and they dumped her on Bidston Hill to die, poor thing. But someone got her to the vets, and because my dog had just died, they said did I want her, so I said all right. She’s fine now. Real lovely. Keeps me company and I’m on my own now, you know, like.

I’ve always had dogs; not big ones but middle-sized ones, you know. She’s the littlest I’ve ever had. Dead-little; a Yorkshire Terrier. I can’t manage a bigger dog now ‘cause my legs are bad, but we get about on this electric scooter. We do, don’t we.

I had dogs ‘cause I couldn’t have kids, like. I had one but I lost it because of, you know, whatsername. So I got a pub and it was all right, then someone said I was eating a lot of crisps and stuff and I had backache, so I went to the doctor and he said, “Let me examine you.”

“‘Examine me?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“Because you’ve got backache and are eating all them crisps.” So he said I was pregnant and I had twins.

Well, they’re not dead-close like twins you read about. They aren’t like whatsername. They’re opposites. Girl and boy, married and with their own families now, you know. Grandkids.

So my daughter phones me up and says come to the dog rescue place with me, over by, you know, whatsername, ‘cause she’s adopting a dog for her girl. So there’s me sitting on the bin at the dog place while she’s wiping tears and falling in love with this dog that’s hers now, and my son goes and phones me up, like, and says he wants to get a dog for his lad and will I meet up with him at the dog whatsit to help pick one. And then he says to me what’s all that woofing down the phone, and I’m laughing and tells him I’m already there at the dog place with her, you know. “She didn’t say nothing to me,” he says, so I says well you didn’t say nothing to her, either, and we’re laughing and so he comes and picks one, and it’s the one from the exact opposite side of the corridor, like.

They’re always doing stuff like that. But I don’t believe in any of that whatsername, you know, like they show it on the telly and they know what each other’s thinking about with blindfolds on. No. I don’t trust any of that. And my kids couldn’t have caught any psychic whatsername from anywhere. Mine are dead-normal, like, you know.

Anyway, we’ll go a bit further, now. We like our walk in the park, don’t we. Well, it’s not a proper walk because of my whatsernames, but we get about, don’t we, Flossie.