Caught in the act

If they want to mess with my head, then I can mess with theirs.

Unfortunately however, after sneaking up on me in the dark they have now solved the mystery of the cooker timer that goes off in the middle of the night.

Surely some mistake?

Is it just me or does the latest addition to B and W's art collection consititute psychological torture for a sheepdog?

Surely they can't be serious?  If only I had opposable thumbs, I'd be straight on the phone to Esther Rantzen.

Right back in the dog house

Blogging may be limited this week as I ate some of the keys on the laptop and even though I regurgitated them, it now needs to go to the computer shop to be repaired.

I am also dealing with a major human over-reaction, including W threatening to send me to live on a farm,  after B took me to the pub (for socialisation purposes). He was delighted to see me lie down quietly under the table while he enjoyed a few pints. 

It was only when he and his companion stood up to leave that they realised I had spent the time gnawing through his friend's artificial leg.

How the **** was I to know?

Animal Attraction

You know, it always amazes me how much the British public love us animals.

This week’s news has been dominated by wildlife stories. First of all a ‘hopping mad’ wallaby was caught in Lyme Regis after being rugby tackled by a fire fighter. No-one knows where it came from, but, the RSPCA says there are lot of them living wild.  Really?  My biggest shock of the week was coming face-to-face with a depressed-looking fox outside the front door of the cottage. Imagine suddenly bumping into a random marsupial!

Then a man tried to take his pony on the train from Wrexham to Holyhead.

And finally, staff at Blackpool Aquarium found a secret shark living in their half a million litre tank. To be precise, they discovered eggs from a carpet shark, which had until then been living undetected – apparently hiding fro the other, much nastier sharks. (It may not be a shark ,of course – it may turn out to be a red herring.  Boom boom!)

In dog world, I went to see Skydiver Liz (one of my favourite humans) to wish her happy birthday and then headed off to Wrexham town centre, fund raising for the Mountain Rescue Team.  I was hugged, stroked and petted by the population of North Wales and, along with  a few other humans and search dog Bonnie we managed to raise more than £500.

Apart from my failed attempts to sexually assault search dog Bonnie and to steal a child's sausage roll, the day was deemed a great success. Weird gave out more than 150 stickers to people handing over their cash, while B used bacon strips to convince me to do tricks. 

At least we now know that if it all goes wrong he can tie me to the end of a piece of string and between us we can generate enough small change for a bottle of White Lightning and a pig’s ear.


Before fund raising



 

After fund raising





Just call me Kenny Dogleash

My favourite ball on a string

Back from the Cow Field, where I found myself in trouble yet again.

The Cow Field is next to the Football Field and I simply joined in a game of football.  I am actually very good at it. In fact when I was holiday and stole a toddler’s ball, then dribbled it up the beach; the child’s father said I should have been called Rooney.

This started me imagining a dog fantasy football team, called The Rovers, obviously...  

Sir Bobby Paw (Team Captain)

Peter Bonetti (goalkeeper)

Brian LaBone

Ross Barkley

Johan Crufts

Didier Dogba

Doggo Maradona  

EL Hadji Woof

Gnashley Cole

Chris Barker

Robbie Growler

With Alan Ball (on a string) and Butch Wilkins in reserve.

Sorry, I digress. Back to the story.

Invading the pitch is unusual for a Tuesday – it’s something I usually do on a Wednesday, when Beard is at mountain rescue training and Weird has to take me out on her own.  This usually results in her trying to catch me for 10 minutes while both teams leave the field, followed by a round of apologies and general grovelling.

I must say that the Cow Field has become one of my favourite places since rabid Bono (see February blog) has now disappeared (presumably he’s been made into Araldite based on his previous performance). Other than a crazy German Shepherd whose human jogs around wearing Speedos and occasionally wrestles him to the ground for no apparent reason, the local dog population is very civilised. Top of my list are Rosie, Galu, Caspar, Molly and Trevor – all collies, along with spaniels Harvey and Charlie. We all meet up once or twice a day and  generally go berserk. 

What’s best about the Cow Field is that it is an egalitarian community.  The humans refer to each other as ‘Bounce’s dad’, ‘Rosie’s mum’ ........ and even ‘Harvey’s nan’. Hysterical!  No-one talks about work , money, cars, they just talk about dogs.

B and Galu’s mum have recently come up with a dog socialisation training project that involves spending Thursday evenings in the bar at The Ship and this is proving surprisingly popular.  Not for us dogs, mind, who have to lie quietly under the table.  We mostly spend the time searching for discarded chips and peeling previously-used chewing gum from under the table tops. This is delicious - you should try it.

I did have one moment of joy at the Cow Field last week.  Being Wednesday night, B was off being Ray Mears, so W had to take me out, which she plainly loathed.  After trudging around for an hour she threw my ball on a string over the barbed wire fence (RSPCA-level negligence in my opinion) and I dropped in on the way back. 

Too lazy to walk to the end of the field, she crawled through, reached the ball and found herself firmly fixed by the hair.  So there she was, bum in the air in the middle of an empty field, trapped. 

I suppose I could have attempted some Lassie-style rescue, but frankly I couldn’t be bothered, so I lay down and had a doze. It took her half an hour to escape.  

Just as well that German Shepherd and Speedo guy didn’t put in an appearance... anything could have happened.

Breaching the perimeter

Unbelievable.   My obsession with snails meant I spotted this piece of news straight away.

It seems that a GIANT SNAIL has just completed the London Marathon after a 36-day crawl around the course.  Brian the Snail (aka 49-year old Lloyd Scott) dragged himself on a sled with a nine foot long costume on top of him. 

http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/863242-human-snail-finishes-london-marathon-in-26-days

Even B, who is prone to wearing ridiculous headgear and trying to out-do guests at fancy dress parties, wouldn’t go that far.  Apart from wearing a furry hat with sewn-on dog ears when we go out for walks, his triumph to date has been recruiting seven very small women to go to a party dressed as dwarves, while he turned up as Snow White.  You couldn’t make it up. On Royal Wedding Day, W had to spend quite some time persuading him not to wear a crown to go to the pub.

Embarrassing humans aside, I have had something of a triumph myself.  Last night B and W coaxed me into the kitchen with some sausages and peanut butter, then quick as a flash locked the dog-proof double-door security system, legged it to the car and buggered off to a party in the depths of North Wales.

I was less than impressed.

To cut a long story short, once I’d finished the peanut butter and eaten the tulips which they’d kindly left in a vase on the table, it took a relatively short time to pick the lock on the door and pull it open. Then, by backing up to the far end of the kitchen and running at high speed I managed to clear the second gate.  Result.

In their confidence, they had left the stair defences open, so I had the whole house to myself! 

After unravelling the toilet roll in Andrex-style and eating some flip flops in the bedroom I needed a rest, so when they arrived home several hours later, they actually found me asleep in their bed. You should have seen their faces!!!

To quote my favourite embarrassing human, the unmatchable Charlie Sheen:

“Your perimeter’s been breached – you got work to do bro!.”

Find his other amazing quotes at www.livethesheendream.com.

Testicles, shoplifting and total shame

Well here I am, back at last... bigger, barkier and blogging!

Having spent the afternoon eating a duvet which I found next to my bed (and therefore presumed was a gift) and chasing a bluebottle around the house, I have finally settled down to catch up on March and April. 

At seven months old, inexplicably my two latest pastimes are chasing flying insects and growling at my own testicles. Don’t ask me why.

........Anyhow what a two months it has been!

First of all, I was rushed to dog hospital in the middle of the night.  And all because of my nemesis.  Snails.

It happened after B&W took it upon themselves to administer a flea and worm treatment which grumpy vet insisted was CRITICAL to protect me from lungworm, given my history of dining on snails.... (they are carriers, evidently, the tasty little blighters).

To put it simply, it made me go nuts.  I had a severe neurological reaction and a ‘psychotic episode’.  One minute I was nodding off on the dogbed watching a 1996 episode of Antiques Roadshow on the History Channel, the next I was tripping like Keith Richards in a cocaine snowdome. 

Apparently it was all down to moxidectin, which can make us collies go bonkers. Humans please take note.  The only good side was B and W’s follow-up trip to Costco to stock up catering-size packs of pig ears, to try to assuage their guilt. I have probably eaten the ears from a whole herd of piggies.

Anyhow, I had just been discharged from hospital when Weird managed to lose two jobs in one week ,  which she blamed on Government cuts– a process which she referred to as being ‘Cameroned’.  Despite the obvious risk to the dog food budget, how did the two responsible adults deal with this news?  Writing a CV? Scanning the situations vacant? No. They put me and the tent in the back of the Landrover , drove to the farthest bit of Cornwall, and morphed into middle-aged surf dudes.

As this was our first holiday en famille, I like to think that my presence brightened the whole experience.  I managed to add some ventilation to the tent and on one occasion ate their lunch while they weren’t looking, but my moment of glory came in the middle of Brixham High Street on an excursion into Devon. 

With me trailing behind on the extending lead, they became momentarily engrossed in a shop window.  This gave me the opportunity to quickly pop into the doorway of the fashion boutique next door and shoplift a rather attractive black feather boa. The effect was enhanced as, in order to carry it, I had to lift my head up in the style of Quentin Crisp. I got about 50 yards down the road before they noticed the hysterical tourists and turned around to see what they were laughing at.  Weird had to go to back the shop and in the process coined what has become something of a tight-lipped, whispered catchphrase... “The SHAME, Mr Bounce. The SHAME!”

This, however, was nothing compared to Glastonbury on the way home. The campsite, rather than the hippy, fire pit and folk guitar kind of environment they had anticipated, was populated by an army of beige-clothed caravaners with an average age of about 80. The rules included children (even visitors) being banned from the site, the gates being locked at 10pm and insistence on absolute silence after 11pm. 

That evening, the three of us were snoring on the inflatable bed (me in the middle, where I had taken to sleeping with my head on the pillow), when a farm dog started barking in the distance. 

This was to be a seminal moment. It was the exact point in time that I found out I could BARK!

Until then I had only managed whining and testicle-related growling.  Now I discovered I could not just bark. I could bark like a hellhound.  I found I had the biggest, loudest, scariest bark of any dog in the South West of England.

B and W almost died of shock of course, which made it fairly easy for me to escape and circle the campsite, with them chasing me in their pyjamas.  Eventually I was cornered, rather unceremoniously hurled into the back of the car and locked in.

But the best was yet to come.  The farm dog stopped barking at 12.30am, and B appeared at the side of the car.  The ‘sad puppy’ face did the trick as usual, and, despite protestations from W that this was a bad idea, 10 minutes later we were all back in bed.

At 1am, Rover kicked off again. I roared like a velociraptor. Beard picked me up, fought me to the tent door and had just managed to unzip it before his trousers fell down.  This was my chance.  Sadly for him, as I disappeared into the darkness, he stumbled into the Landrover and set off the alarm. Meanwhile I ran to each caravan door in turn, alerting each one with a good “AAAARrrrrrrrrAAAAArrrrrrrr!”

If Glastonbury was not prepared for noise after 11pm, it was definitely not prepared for a 6 foot 8 Scouser in underpants crashing through the campsite shrubbery in the  early hours of the morning, against the backdrop of an ear-splitting car alarm and the hound of the Baskervilles, shouting: “Come here, you  d*ckhead!”.

We left at dawn without asking for a refund.  Beard put Motorhead on the car stereo as we drove through the campsite and I threw in a few barks.  W didn’t speak to either of us until Knutsford Services.

Post-duvet eating snooze

Locked in the Landy