It’s raining dogs and British ladies

This afternoon I am standing in the MTC lobby, watching the rain through the glass double doors.  Suddenly from one side of my makeshift TV screen runs a little white poodle on a long leash, who makes a wide trotting circle around one of the olive trees flanking the doors, and then runs off screen left.  Instantly another poodle appears – another because this one has a blue leash while the other’s was teal – and then a woman, decked out in a raincoat.  She gets held up on the one looped up poodle around the tree, and tugs on her leash, but the dog just struggles to go forward, not back-around.

I watch for a minute as the woman attempts to uncircle the poodle, who just follows her around the tree again.

If not for the rain I might not be standing there; but I push the door open and ask “Can I help you with that?”

“Oh, you can actually!” the woman says in a pleasantly surprising Natasha Richardson-esque accent.  “If you hold her leash I’ll take her around the tree” at which point she plucks up the dog around the middle and deposits her on the other side, instructing her to come to me.

“She does this every tree we come to,” she tells me, “thank you so much.”

As I jump back inside and close the door I hear her say to the dog, in her delightful accent, “Now don’t do it again.”

(Just say that out loud to yourself in your best Natasha Richardson accent.  Isn’t that fun and pleasing to the ear?  It’s obvious why I was so tickled by this interaction, right?)