Puppies are always good for breaking the ice - and if you bring them up right, grown dogs aren't bad...
I'd been walking them in the park, well I walk, they run But they'd finally slowed down a bit and I was leading them back towards the gate. There was a group sitting on the grass and the dogs ran over.
Now the dogs themselves are fine, not an ounce of malice in them at all, but for those who don't like dogs, their energy and enthusiasm doesn't go down well. Small kids are the most risky: my dogs aren't that big, but kids come even smaller - and there were two in this group: the girl, I later discovered, was five and the other had just had his first birthday. I upped my pace from a gentle shamble to a brisk walk, ready to call them off if their attentions weren't welcome.
This time there was no problem: the kids' mum called the dogs and started to stroke them, calling her daughter to come and join in. Even when the baby got a big lick on his face, that only led to laughter.
"Come and join us. Have a beer. What are the dogs' called?"
"Sure. Thanks. Hawk and Trap." (It would have been BJ, but try yelling that across the park!)
"Ah, a MASH fan!"
I admitted guilt and sank cross legged onto the grass, pulled out the trusty Leatherman and opened the bottle pushed into my hand.
We sat and talked. The daughter put both dogs on their leads and got pulled round the field; loving every minute.
Introductions revealed that the mum was called Cathy, her daughter was Jane, her baby was Gazza (yeah, after the footballer), the other girl was Vicky, and their friend with the dreadlocks was Ivan (search me!). Cathy's husband was out with his mates and she was out with hers.
It transpired that the case of Stella was following an earlier one of Bud - and they kept flowing.
Ivan and Vicky were playing while we talked: he'd scissored his legs around her, rolled her back onto the grass and started kissing her. The others kept talking and next time I looked, he was behind her, reaching round with both hands to grab her tits...
Gazza got hungry, so Cathy lifted her top, applied baby to teat, and carried on talking. That created the next topic of conversation. As Cathy pointed out, no one could actually see anything, but there was quite a debate. One of the others (there were three or four others clustered round a bench about 30 yards away) had come over. She, Malawi, or something like that that I didn't quite catch, didn't like dogs, so she was standing stiffly to one side, and she was against public breast feeding. That lead into other things: that Cathy had stopped both smoking and drinking as soon as she'd found she was pregnant and hadn't started again until Gazza was 9 months old.
But now she was: drinking her own beer and smoking my fags - theirs had run out.
Time passed and even though I was older than anyone else there by thirty years, I got along with them fine. The sun was starting to go behind the trees though and a move was planned: to Malawi's house. Cathy was moaning about having to push Gazza in his buggy all the way up the hill, so without thinking about it I said that if she'd come to mine (all of 50 yards along the flat), I'd only had a couple of bottles, so I'd give her and her kids a lift.
That was what happened. I left the dogs at home and took the opportunity to pick up some more smokes, then off we went.
The party itself was OK, but I was starting to feel my age - not quite in tune - when Cathy said she had to get home to put the kids to bed. I grabbed the opportunity to leave and offered my transport again - and a few minutes later I found myself helping to put Jane and Gazza to bed.
As kids do after a day out in the fresh air and sun, they were asleep almost as soon as their heads touched their pillows and Cathy and I were out on the landing, pulling the door closed.
"Thanks for that," said Cathy, "and I'm sorry if I embarrassed you earlier on - dragging my saggy tits out in front of you."
"No problem, that didn't embarrass me. Nursing mums are sexy! If I looked uncomfortable, that was just jealousy!"
"Jealousy? How'd you mean...?"
"I wanted to be sucking on the other one. All men like sucking a tit, but the opportunity to do it when there's milk there is very rare. It's only happened twice to me, that I can remember - when my own kids were born. And my wife usually didn't have enough milk for me to do it much even then."
I suddenly realised what I was saying. The atmosphere amongst these twenty-odd year olds had been so laid back that it just came out before I thought, but now I saw her cheeks turn pink.
"Oops," I said. "My turn to say sorry. I'm embarrassing you now."
"Not exactly. We seem to have something in common. .." Cathy cleared her throat. "Do you mean that you'd actually like... to...?"
