Birthday treats and broken bones

Listening to some birthday tunes

Well it’s been an interesting month in dog world.

The main highlight was my first birthday, which saw me presented with a bag of Sainsbury’s doggie doughnuts (highly recommended) and a new green rubber thing on a string which has become my favourite possession. W keeps calling it my ‘wubby’, which I find more than a little patronising, but what can a dog do? 

Actually, if I’m honest, that was the only highlight.

The first challenge came when Beard disappeared for a while and then came back wearing a leg brace and lay on the settee in the style of a Jane Austen character with an attack of the vapours. Meanwhile W ferried him an endless supply of sandwiches and cups of tea. Skydiver Liz turned up and instead of the usual dog treats, brought jelly babies. To my total disgust he ate the lot, on the grounds that they would make me hyperactive.

Apparently all of this fuss arose because he had been in hospital.

I quickly realised that B had timed the whole hospital thing to coincide with the Rugby World Cup, so we watched most games snuggled up together on the sofa while W made food, tidied up, went to work and generally rushed about getting in the way of the television.

Sadly for me, her daily itinerary included taking on dog walking, at 6.00am and 5.00pm.  I have to say, the morning sessions were marked by excessive grumpiness, which generally started when I ran upstairs and jumped on her head at 5.30am.  One morning I ate her bra straps in all the excitement and, quite frankly, she went mental.  Well, come on... none of this would happen if she didn’t leave it on the floor.

Evening sessions were marginally better, although she did get quite a lot of mosquito bites. B nicknamed her ‘grumpy lumpy’ but I’m not sure she saw the joke.

Then, a couple of weeks into Beard’s convalescence, everything went badly wrong.

Early one Sunday morning, the Grump and I had left B snoozing and we were on our second circuit of the Cow Field, when a black Labrador appeared in the distance.  It came across two fields like a speeding bullet.

And then it tried to steal my green thing.

I am not proud of what happened next, but in the melee, Weird’s engagement ring got caught in my collar.  To be fair, we stopped fighting when we heard her fingers snap.

So now B is hopping about doing the chores while W awaits surgery with her arm in a plaster cast. And we have run out of dog food because apparently Sainsbury is not within hopping distance.

They both have to take me on walks now, but because they can’t actually get very far, they stand at different ends of the football field and kick the ball from one to the other while I shuttle between them. On a positive note W is developing some impressive ball control. If they ever want an angry pre-menopausal woman to appear on Wayne Rooney’s Street Soccer, the girl’s in with a chance.

No chance of a walk then?