Daily Exercise - one hour. No more than 5 miles from home.

Daily Exercise - one hour. No more than 5 miles from home. By Jo-Ann Hughes.

Today, a wonderfully sunny day, a day after a grey, wet, windy yesterday, I am excited to go for a long walk. I say excited but probably mean keen!

We set off. I can hardly describe it as exercise as we stop and sniff all callers at the back gate. Having snuffed up as much doggie pee as one can possibly inhale, we lunge for the corner. There’s a tree stump left in the grass verge and is a particular favourite poochie place.

Several tedious seconds lapse with me stepping out of the way of other irritated perambulators. I give Daisy and Millie a yank of the lead. They know it’s time to move on. Next stop is the holly bush further up the road. It’s a favoured choice of Daisy’s. She tucks herself under the lower spikes, hunches her back and throws out several spherical turds, which satisfyingly land on fallen holly prickles. Try wrapping your bagged hand around that without pricking yourself! ‘Do you ever like me, Daisy?’ I ask bewildered by the task of collecting in such dangerous detritus. She simply looks at me with innocent brown orbs that speak of love. In an attitude of gratitude, I congratulate her on the solidity and shape of her poop.

She is pulled by her impatient sister. We turn the next corner and they’re off. Released from the lead, Millie, a secret and private pooer, charges over brown, puddly mud to find a tree to hide behind. Between me and her is twenty yards of quagmire. If truth be known I would have walked on innocently with my earphones in listening to Woman’s Hour; some dreadful tortuous life of a woman awaiting execution in America. Isn't it society who create monsters? Why scapegoat the one when she has been tortured enough?

Anyway with my conscience speaking to me, I trudge after her, slipping and sliding on rotting leaves and left over slush from the weekend’s heavy snow. When I get there, I have to stand a while and focus. It’s the same colour as the dead fronds and foliole left from autumn. So I look for steam and shape. Unlike Daisy who performs a neat pile for scooping, Millie has perfected a scrunched up back leg shuffle that drops her plops in a two metre trail. Her back legs cleverly remain tucked under her chin. Does she even have a chin? Well, to be fair, she has a beard!

Thankfully, the sun was shining and gleaming on the spherical lumps. After a few squinting, squirming moments, her delivery was ready for posting in the little red box at the end of the path. The path! Yes, the path! I now had to wade through slimed ice to get to safety. The last thing I needed was a muddy puddle to bathe in.

Ablutions performed, we set off! But not so fast! Every stride was met with anxiety. What are they sniffing? What are they eating? What’s that in Daisy’s mouth? Not another stolen tennis ball!What’s Millie up to? Why is she sniffing that cockapoo’s arse? 'No, you oversized giddy, great dane, my babies do not want to play with you. You kick them in the head and sit on them.’

Moving on, we greet all the other schnauzers in the park while exchanging compliments with their marvellous mummies and daddies.

A dark, hairy sheep dog is zigzagging his way towards us wanting to frisk my two before rounding them up. He meets Daisy with derision and Millie’s making a charge… for me as usual. She’s such a coward. Looking wide eyed and scared, like a victim in a school yard, she skirts round me for protection.

We head into open grassland. No other dogs in sight, only a few birds to chase. Now we can gather the pace I crave; get a bit of a work out. There’s no rabbit poo to munch on; no left over lunches to lick and no trees to intoxicate them. Just us and an open expanse of green.

I manage fifty paces with Daisy near by and as I look for Millie, I stop. I walk back! I shout! Millie! Millie! Millie! before I see her disappearing towards the black rubbish bin overspilling with discarded litter. She is so deaf when she wants to be. Screaming, ‘no’, I run after her, not easy in rubber wellys, just in time to stop her salivating over someone’s mush and squish!

Gathering her on the lead, a punishment for her greed, and giving her a look that once withered teenagers in my classroom, we carried on to the next bend. I want to go on. The sun is shining. The sky is blue. The air is fresh. There are no others sharing this wonderful solitude.

Then Millie begins digging in her heals, yanking back on the lead, all four legs glued together, stopping. I look down. ‘Millie, don’t do this we have just got going!’ I say feeling deflated. To which looking sad and pleading with her brown doe like eyes, I halt just in time for her to … throw up! ‘Oh my! You poor thing I say’, rubbing her tummy, when really I wanted to kick her up the arse for eating something nasty, and spoiling another daily soak in the sun. Luckily for us all, a nice person appeared!

Waiting for her to give me the all clear before heading straight home, my head bowed, exercise over, I do not speak.

So much for one hour of daily fitness, I moan. More like thirty minutes of anxious torture! And then I remember the poor woman incarcerated in America, awaiting execution as the sun disappears.