The Pawshank Redemption

FREE MR BOUNCE!

I have returned.

After four days in dog jail for a crime I did not commit.

Which, readers will note, is a MONTH in dog time.

And while I am actually back in the dog bed at the cottage, I feel that I should now be in an open top car, heading for an old sailboat on a Pacific beach.

It all started innocently enough. When I saw B packing up Piggywig , the wubby and the bag of birthday doggie doughnuts,  I just presumed we were off camping again, so I jumped willingly into the car. Twenty minutes later I found   myself outside a strange building being bundled into a cage. Yes a CAGE. And then he was off. Leaving me there with a bunch of barking mutts, who would have been banging their tin mugs on the bars if only they’d had any.

There I was,  left in a wire run, in a yard with some other collies and big dogs.  To add insult to injury, just across the yard were the socially superior dogs, who had their own apartments. Honestly.  They had bedrooms with TVs and four poster beds.  These were mostly little yappy things – the ones that Weird refers to as ‘Handbag Dogs’. Talk about how the other half live.

The yard itself had a definite Shawshank feel, with a big Setter next door called Red and some predatory-looking Rotweilers across the way.  I felt I brought an Andy Dufresne-style influence to the proceedings...

I could see why some of the boys took him for snobby. He had a quiet way about him, a walk and a talk that just wasn't normal around here. He strolled, like a man in a park without a care or a worry in the world, like he had on an invisible coat that would shield him from this place. Yeah, I think it would be fair to say... I liked Andy from the start.

In the end, apart from the appalling injustice, the stay was just about tolerable. My cellmates were friendly enough – and one of them could open doors, despite having only one front paw – so that was impressive. There was much brushing, hosing and jet washing – which have the potential to keep me fascinated for hours – and we got to run in a field. 

To be honest, what with barking, eating and sleeping, I didn’t have much time to plan my escape.  I was just getting onto it when B suddenly appeared from nowhere and tempted me into the back of the Landy with a pig ear. 

Of course, had they been away longer, they just might have found an empty cell....

In 2011 Mr Bounce escaped from prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of paw prints, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. Oh, Bouncy loved geology. I imagine it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure, and time.

I love my new blanket

Postscript:  Big thank you to Jodie the Staffy, who sent me a lovely new dog blanket for my birthday. It was waiting for me when I got out of jail. At least someone loves me.

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?

High days, holidays and a hurricane

I have triumphed.

Prolonged good behaviour - including walking to heel; collapsing dramatically to the floor when they pretend to shoot me; and wearing a ridiculous blue snood without attempting to tear it off, meant that I avoided the dreaded kennels and got to go on holiday.

And where did we go in the worst summer in living memory? Scotland.

On a positive note there were no midgies. They had all drowned or died of hypothermia.

We drove through the night to get to the beautiful Isle of Arran. Well until the starter motor seized on the Landy and we had to be towed by an articulated lorry.

Sadly, we were followed by Hurricane Katya, which meant we were trapped there for some considerable time because the ferries were cancelled.  Of course, I don’t mind 70 mile an hour winds and torrential rain, so I had a pretty good time with lots of walks, football and swimming in the sea, mostly accompanied by a cheerful Beard, whose mantra was: “why let a bit of water spoil your holiday?”

Despite the conditions he spent hours collecting driftwood, foraging for mushrooms and cooking on an open fire (no matches allowed though as those are for wimps). He also made friends with Angus the mechanic and his brother-in-law Robin who let us camp in his field.  This was helpful because when the serious weather warning finally meant we had to abandon the tent for our own safety, he also let us stay in his cottage. 



Baking bread




Yum!





Weird seemed strangely quiet during the trip, although to be fair I could only see a small proportion of her face through her waterproofs.  When these started to leak, B said he would buy her an American army poncho for the next holiday for when she was collecting firewood.  At this point she zipped herself into the tent storage area for some considerable time. 

All in all I had a fantastic time. The only downside was when Weird (who has poor eye-leg coordination) kicked my football into the sea and it was lost.  To be fair, I think the layers of clothing and balaclava restricted her movements.

So... we’re back home and B and I are on our own this week because W had to go and do some work in Cyprus.  We took her to the airport, shared a Ginsters breakfast bar on the way back and went for a game of football.  Then I settled down in the special out-of-bounds chair while B watched the rugby.

Life is good.

I must NEVER sit in this char

Dancing sheep and scary toast

September has been an interesting month.  One of the highlights has been this week with the World Sheepdog Trials on TV.  Mind you, it took me a while to realise all the whistling wasn’t aimed at me – I stared intently at B and W for the first 15 minutes to see if their lips were moving, then did a couple of tours of the house looking for the phantom shepherd before I realised where the sound was coming from.  In their usual juvenile way, they found this highly amusing of course.  I then spent the next hour glued to the screen, occasionally checking behind it when the sheep ran off into the distance.

Sheep have played a big part in my life recently. It all started when, in a sudden moment of clarity one morning, I realised that the garden fence is actually only three feet tall, so I jumped over it.  Next I jumped over the neighbours’ fence – and then, having reached maximum velocity*, cleared the five foot wall into the sheep field.   The woolly ones got quite a shock at my sudden arrival, and by the time Beard followed me over the wall in his pyjama trousers, I had them neatly pinned into one corner.  I thought he’d be impressed by this, but he was incandescent, dragged me back to the cottage and set up a complicated rope system that means I am now clipped on to a wire every time I go out of the front door.  Grrrr.

We went to the local Food and Drink Festival not long after that, which is held at a nearby farm. Due to the fantastic British summer weather, this had all the charms of the Somme, with desperate looking stall holders plying gourmet cheeses and chilli flavoured chocolate, while cagoule-clad visitors stumbled through two feet of welly-sucking mud to get to them.  I passed several toddlers spread-eagled face-down in the mud while their parents attempted to carry buggies over the mire. There were cooking demonstrations, folk musicians and even a circus tent, but the best thing of all was the sheep show.

photo: Flickr Richard Gillin



This was hosted by Craig the New Zealander, who introduced us to his collection of sheep friends. With much abuse targeted at Australians and rather too much innuendo for a morning’s family entertainment, he ended the performance brilliantly with a whole row of sheep, who were dancing ... yes dancing....  to ‘The Hustle’ by the late great Van McCoy.  Baaahrilliant.

I have also had lots of visitors – Skydiver Liz (who has now gone off to throw herself out of a plane); Pilates Susie; Andrea the Accountant; Vicar Jan (who I will love forever because she brought her empty butter container to lick) and -perhaps  most exciting of all – Friendly Pete, who brought my first ever dog visitor, Poppy the Spaniel.  In all honesty, she didn’t share my enthusiasm for intimacy on a first date but we had a good run around on the field, so all was not lost.

Finally, the downside of the month is that I have developed a morbid fear of toast.  Apparently this is a Pavlovian thing.  For some unknown reason, W routinely burns the toast.  This sets off the smoke alarm, which hurts my sensitive dog ears, so I run away.  Now I only have to sniff or clap eyes on a piece of jammy toast and I have a complete panic attack.

So, in conclusion, I love dancing sheep and I really, really hate toast.

*A fit collie can reach speeds of up to 30 miles per hour. That’s faster than Beard’s Landrover



Sorry Vicar!

Jan the vicar came for lunch today, during which I ransacked her handbag and chewed her sunglasses.

But she has forgiven me.

She should be a role model for all the rest of you humans.

Definitely not bad to the bone (this week)

I am still on my best behaviour and quite frankly, everyone is amazed.  I have been walking to heel, sitting, offering paws and looking adoringly at all and sundry.

I think the kennels idea may have been abandoned as B was looking at campsites on the Internet today.  Paws crossed.

Friendly Pete turned up this afternoon. He works with Weird so I was warned to be on my best behaviour.  His friends have taken a year off to travel around the world and each picked their favourite five albums to take with them to indoctrinate their children ..... so he threw B and W the challenge of choosing theirs.

They are still pondering, so here are mine for the record:

Who let the dogs out? Baha Men
Diamond Dogs  Bowie
Rain Dogs  Tom Waits
A Dog's Life  Bonzo Dog Band
Black Dog  Led Zep

Beard - who I am beginning to suspect is clinically insane - was telling Friendly Pete that he has been looking for a motorbike and sidecar for a while, so I can wear goggles and travel around with him.


This is the kind of thing he has in mind..........

But this is more like it- check out Chopper the Biker Dog on Youtube along with George Thorogood's iconic Bad to the Bone.

Grrrrrr

An encounter with Batman

I am on my best behaviour this week.

This is all because I overheard a discussion about holidays, which centred on the pros and cons of kennels. 

The options are currently ‘Scotland’ and ‘Abroad’.  Obviously I have no intention of being left locked up with a bunch of other mutts while they go swanning about in the sun, so for the time being I am being the most adorable, obedient dog imaginable. I am verging on the wonder dog. In fact on Sunday night we were out on the marsh and I walked next to B holding the end of my lead in the style of Lassie!

Suckers.

Other than the self-imposed creeping, I am having a good week, with a trip to the beach in North Wales yesterday and dog-sitting by Grandad Ronbo and Auntie Jean on Saturday night – spelling a plentiful supply of dog biscuits and other treats.

While this was fun, I do worry that the humans are becoming increasingly eccentric.  On Saturday night they strapped on their hiking boots and marched up to the Cow Field. Without me.

Nothing strange about that, you might think.

Except that they went with a Bat Expert, called Laurence, and they were carrying bat detectors. 



This one looks a bit like me



Laurence, from the Bat Conservation Trust, is the world’s most enthusiastic expert on bats.  He knows everything there is to know.  For instance, there are 18 different kinds in the UK and two million of the little blighters, all eating 3,000 insects each night. Who’d have thought it?  And they can live for 30 years... which means there are bats around who remember Bucks Fizz winning the Eurovision Song Contest.

How many people spend their Saturday nights bat detecting?  Especially when they rush back, bursting with excitement because they have identified four types of bat: a pipistrelle, a noctule, a long eared and a whiskered.  A whiskered bat? How can you tell in the dark at 100 miles an hour?

Predictably, Beard is now scouring the web to buy his own bat detector.  Amazingly there is an online shop for bat fanatics, where you can buy these along with other fascinating and useful items.

Sadly if we do get to Scotland I will probably be forced to spend the week listening to high pitched squeaks.

Which reminds me. ... this is not the first family bat experience. When the New Zealand Weirds were visiting recently, there was a clan gathering at Chester Zoo, where the junior Weirds were very taken with the Bat Cave.  Not surprisingly, after half an hour of bat-watching wonderment this led to one of them emerging into the daylight, elated but comprehensively doused in bat droppings. 

During the ensuing (major) clean-up operation, one of the staff mentioned a couple who had been leaving the zoo a week before, only to find a fruit bat hanging upside down, asleep on the back of their pushchair in the car park. 

To  confirm the fact that both my humans are completely mad, Weird has spent the week singing ‘Bat out of Hell’ by Meatloaf to herself.  You can join in here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO9Piug_oqI&ob=av2n

Ironically, Meat Loaf was a vegetarian for 15 years.



Rin Tin Tin eat your heart out