The Adventures of Sam and Paddy
Advanced Level English Reading
Sam is a black Labrador dog who has survived the ravages of hunger on this earth for 15 years. He lives in Rhyl, North Wales, in the Lingualink Language Centre. He and his colleague, Paddy the parrot, know that they are the real 'powers' behind the Lingualink language work. Although the directors, John and Pauline, and their team of teachers think that they, the humans, operate Lingualink, Sam and Paddy know better. They are the ones that steal the students' hearts and have the real power in this work.
Sam is already fluent in English and, having lived with a lot of German students over 10 years, knows quite a bit of German too. He has recently been learning some words in Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese, especially since more and more students from this part of the world have been visiting Lingualink. So, he now understands 'No, Sam', 'Down, Sam', 'Go away, Sam', 'Give it back to me, Sam', 'Leave it alone, Sam', 'Get lost, Sam', 'Scram, Sam' in quite a few languages. Paddy, much younger with only 2 years of experience on this earth, is still mastering English only.
Sam has three modes of waking consciousness and three modes of sleeping consciousness.
His three modes of waking consciousness are: 1. hungry 2. very-hungry
3. extraordinarily-ravenously-uncontrollably-hungry.
His three modes of sleeping consciousness are: 1. dreaming about food 2. dreaming about food 3. dreaming about food
His sleeping consciousness is unfortunately frequently haunted by a terrifying & recurring nightmare that often leaves him awake horror-stricken and bathed in sweat: dreaming that someone has stolen his food.
He also has five modes of waking operation: 1. thinking-about-food 2. watching others eat food
3. functioning as a vacuum-cleaner/kitchen helper by eating scraps of food that fall on the floor or others do not want 4. looking-for-food in waste bins 5. eating-food-(or-anything-that-remotely-resembles-food)-until he-cannot-eat-any-more.
In the afternoons Sam usually takes several longish siestas to while away the interminable hours between lunch-time and supper-time at 6pm. One afternoon Sam was deeply asleep and enjoying a sensuous dream about eating twenty five hamburgers which had been left on the table for the Lingualink students and that he had wolfed down in 2 brief minutes while the students were being called for dinner. Suddenly he was rudely awoken out of his reverie by the rattling of a cage next to his bed. The cage had been placed in his room while he was asleep.
Still half-asleep he wrestled with himself as to whether he was hungry or very-hungry or extraordinarily-ravenously-uncontrollably-hungry. He decided for the last mode and fortunately he was also in his eating-food-or-anything-that-remotely-resembles-food-until-you cannot-eat-anything-else operational mode, so he sleepily climbed out of his bed and ambled towards the bowl of food which was, as was usual at 6 pm, waiting for him on the floor.
Suddenly he became aware of a feathered creature that fluttered down from the top of the large cage and landed on his food dish before him. This creature then started hungrily picking into the food that had been left for Sam. Sam thought he must still be asleep and having a terrible nightmare - so he tried to push the creature aside with his nose. However, when the creature pecked him on the nose, Sam realised that this was indeed hard reality and not an imagined state.
'What's your name?' Sam growled. 'My name's Paddy,' the feathered creature replied. 'What are you doing eating my food,' complained Sam. 'But it's also my food too now' answered Paddy, ' I live here.' Sam was dismayed and watched in horror as the bird continued to devour his supper…
Thus began a long and often uneasy relationship between these two superpowers behind the Lingualink language operation….
It was one of those usual boring afternoons when Sam was trying to while away & sleep away the interminable marathon of time that lay between his lunch at 1pm and his supper at 6pm. It was actually 18,000 seconds in total – he had counted the seconds many times - and there were still 3,600 seconds to go.
‘Lunch at 1 pm. Ha! ha! what a joke,’ Sam thought to himself. ‘Who would call that a ‘lunch’?’ he murmured to himself disparagingly. Lunch for Sam consisted of one dried fig which usually contained a bitter tablet hidden in the fig by his owner. The tablet was a medicine which helped to alleviate Sam’s onset of arthritis. (We’ll tell you how the arthritis began in another story.) Sam detested the pills. He usually managed to detect where the tablet was in the fig and spit it out before eating the food. So the garden was now littered with 200 half-eaten, half-digested, half-swallowed, but carefully concealed, bitter tablets. And a small bottle of 100 such tablets cost £50, so whenever John, the owner of the house and the purchaser of the tablets, found one on the ground outside Sam usually got a telling-off.
Episode 1
Sam meets Paddy
Episode 2
Sam's Revenge
Lunch was also usually accompanied by the daily sermon from John. ‘Sam, we can’t feed you much today because you’re getting too fat. You’ve got to go on a diet, Sam, and you’ve got to lose weight. You’re getting too lazy in your old age, Sam’. And that was why lunch had been cut down to one fig. ‘Ha, what a joke!’ Sam moaned again.
Paddy the parrot had now been in the house for two weeks and Sam was having to get used to Paddy pecking away at his own bowl of food when it was served at 6pm.
But one day, Sam saw John carrying in a large plastic bag full of bird-food into the kitchen where Sam slept. It contained of all sorts of seeds, peanuts, candied fruit, nuts and other goodies. It was kept in a ground-level cupboard just a metre of so from Sam’s bed (actually it was 3 feet 2 inches and six-eighths of an inch from the very place where Sam’s nose rested as he lay in his bed – Sam had measured it carefully.)
In the middle of the night, when everyone else was sleeping and Paddy’s cage had been covered up for the night, Sam crawled carefully, and painfully because of his arthritis, out of his bed and went to inspect the door of the cupboard, which was closed. To his great satisfaction he saw that the belt of a coat, hanging on a peg inside the door, was jammed in the door and the end was trailing outside. Sam picked up the loose end and gave it a gentle tug and ‘hey, presto’, the door opened. There lay the treasure trove of delectable goodies. So, Sam, set about ripping open the plastic bag and gorging the contents of the bag and quite a bit of the bag itself too, wolfing it down in about 3 minutes flat. Then he returned contentedly to his bed.
‘That’ll teach that bird never to mess around with my food again,’ he thought to himself gleefully and he slept the sleep of the just and the justified.
The next morning, when John came to feed Paddy, there was no seed to be found. ‘Hey, Pauline,’ he shouted to his wife, ‘that flaming dog’s got into the cupboard and eaten all Paddy’s food….’
Paddy eyed Sam with a cold, unflinching and steely gaze from his cage. A silent war had been declared, although a delicate and uneasy peace still prevailed for the moment but one cloaked by the veneer of a superficial companionship.
© Lingualink Ltd, RhylEpisode 3
The Dream
This state of uneasy co-existence and ‘cold war’ between Sam and Paddy persisted for several weeks. Then an event took place that finally thawed the ice age of their common history.
One afternoon, some time later, Sam had awoken several times from a recurring fantastic nightmare. He kept dreaming that his master had become half-crazed while taking him for a walk on the beach. His master kept whirling round like a dervish and throwing his favourite bone into the sea for Sam to go and fetch. Each time the master screamed out a refrain with a peal of insane laughter: ‘You’re getting too fat, Sam. Ha! ha! ha! ha! And you need plenty and plenty and plenty of exercise. Ha! ha! ha! ha! This is for your own good, Sam, and I am helping you. Ha! ha! ha! ha!’ Each time the bone was thrown further and further out to sea and into the deep …until finally the bone sank and was irretrievably lost. Sam awoke frozen with dread and was bathed in a cold sweat. But then he relaxed as he realised it was only a dream.
Next week Sam awoke from another, even worse, fantastic nightmare. He dreamt that his cousin Fin had come to stay. Fin was a young golden retriever who lived with the director’s daughter in another part of town, near to a lake that he loved to swim in. While the director’s daughter was away Fin had been brought over to Sam’s house to stay the night. He slept in the room separated from Paddy and Sam’s sleeping quarters by a thin, moveable divide.
Fin had beautifully large and deceptively innocent, doleful eyes. He was still in the puberty of his years and was a boisterous, bouncy, enthusiastic, exuberant and scatterbrained one-year-old. When Fin was brought over Sam always muttered under his breath: ‘Oh, no, that damned stupid dog’s come to stay again!’ Fin was so full of energy that he always ran four walks when everyone else walked one and swam in every lake, river, sea, bath, puddle and cow pat that ever came into sight which everyone else studiously avoided.
Fin had another major problem. Like Sam, he too suffered from an ‘I-am-always-hungry-and-I-am-always-deprived-of-food’ complex, only his complex was a far more serious case than Sam’s. When Fin’s food was put before him, it was like the beginning of a Michael Schumacher Formula One race. Under starter’s orders…then faster than even Michael Schumacher could cover the first 100 metres of his start, Fin had wolfed, pigged, gobbled, slopped his food down, was finished and was looking around for more, leaving Schumacher still on the starting line. For Fin was young and growing….and growing…..and growing…
It was 5 pm as Sam drifted briefly back into consciousness, glimpsed the time on the clock and then rejoined the restless dream about Fin’s stay in his house. The dream then began to take an ominous turn towards a nightmare. There was a sudden commotion in the next room where Fin was sleeping. Furniture fell, doors slammed open, plates clattered to the floor, bags sounded like they were being ripped open. This was accompanied by slopping, gobbling, munching, swallowing, pigging, gulping, ripping, gnawing noises which then gave way to squawking and howling noises. As Sam dreamed, a passing thought passed, but then returned and began to clamour for his attention: Fin was sleeping in the room where the cupboard containing Sam’s 3 kg bag of food and Paddy’s 0.5 kg bag of seed were kept. Sam was suddenly catapulted into wakefulness. His ears were alert and were straining for any slightest sound emitting from the adjoining room. But, no, there was nothing. All was silent. It had been another awful nightmare.
So Sam began to doze again. But then came the renewed squawking with a cry from Paddy. ‘Sam, Sam, wake up, Fin’s trying to eat our food.’ The silence, which had been Sam’s entry point into wakefulness, had been but an illusory lull in the proceedings. For indeed the dividing door had been slightly pushed opened by Fin’s weight during the pandemonium and Paddy had flown through when he saw Fin, who had used a similar trick to open the cupboard door, devouring both bags of food. Paddy had launched himself like a missile, flew into Fin’s face and was determinedly laying siege to Fin’s nose. Sam realised that his nightmare was in fact harsh reality.
Fin stopped abruptly with a yelping and a howling. Then just as John, the master of the house, burst in to see what all the hullabaloo was all about, Fin scooted sharply back to his bed and lay there with mournful, innocent eyes.
The kitchen was a mess. The bags were ripped open all over the floor. Seed and food was everywhere. Carpets and matting had been torn to shreds. Even a wooden chair leg had been half gnawed. But Paddy had saved the day. Their food, though strewn all over the floor, was nevertheless safe and could be scooped back up by the master into new, and this time firm, dog-proof receptacles.
Thus began the thaw in Sam-Paddy relations. They settled down together, amicably for once, to their 6 pm supper while John regaled Pauline about that ‘damned stupid dog that’s come to stay’. Fin lay curled up in his bed, nursing his hurt pride after a verbal tongue-lashing from John. Sam and Paddy felt a warm glow and agreed that it had been a job well done – together.
© Lingualink Ltd, Rhyl