For soon enough it’ll be R time – either retirement or redundancy. We’re not sure which it will be, although this newspaper’s new owners may have a better idea.

Anyhoo, as mentioned in a previous piece, a complete lack of expertise has ruled out any chance of joining our friends at the Men’s Shed. We also have zero interest in pursuits like gardening.

And as of the Wednesday night of last week we’ve put a big red line through another possibility – house sitting.

We had our first and last crack at baby sitting a house. It didn’t end well.

Magnanimously we came to the aid of a Close Family Member (CFM). She had signed on a House Sitter Of Renown (HSOR), however, the HSOR was a late scratching. So cometh the hour and all that and this correspondent somewhat reluctantly answered the call.

Now we have to say from the start the house where we stayed is a significant improvement on our regular digs at Struggle Street. It’s spotlessly clean, there’s food in the fridge and even river views. There’s no cockroaches. A high tech tele was provided for us to watch, however that proved to be the start of our problems, for we couldn’t work out how to operate the thing. So we went all old fashioned and read a book. As a sidelight we can thoroughly recommend Mike Carlton’s excellent tome On Air.

Life in retirement/redundancy as a house sitter was starting to look like a treat. Unfortunately there was one major downside – the resident dog.

We like dogs. For many years we owned a dog, the incomparable Tia. Trained to almost military precision and obedient to a fault, Tia was a delight to be with – the polar opposite to the canine in our care last week.

This silly thing spent much of the night doing her best to annoy this correspondent, jumping on and off chairs, licking and scratching, chasing its tail and generally being a first class, Olympic gold medal winning nuisance. 

And that wasn’t the worst of it for when it came to retire to bed (with fresh sheets and everything), the dog began to bark. And bark. And bark some more. Incessantly. 

Sleep was impossible. Heavily fatigued, we thought of disposing of the yapping mutt off a nearby bridge and leaving her for the bull sharks. But we feared reprisal from the RSPCA, as that would have been unfair on the bull sharks.

It was a long, restless night and any thoughts we may have entertained about a house sitting career were completely obliterated.

“You look even crankier than usual,’’ Editor Bell cheerfully noted as we sleep walked into work the next day.

“Mad,’’ we replied.

“We’re barking mad.”