… I’m being replaced.
Today the Dad brought what I at first thought was a friend back with him from Work. They told me that it was a present from the Auntie Alice a couple of years ago.
I did my best to make friends with it, sniffing its nose,
and even bringing it one of my toys to play with, but it was no good.
My nose, as you might guess, is thoroughly out of joint.
They might tell you that I’m sleepy because I spent last night on the Aidan’s bed instead of in mine on the kitchen floor, but that has absolutely nothing to do with it. The reason I’m exhausted is that I walked with the Dad all the way to Work and back, as well as carrying out my office dog duties.
These started off as mainly security, seeing off those suspcious characters who come to the back door in vans marked DHL or Parcelforce. They don’t fool me. I try to scare off the front door intruders as well, the ones looking for fair trade coffee, but the Mum doesn’t seem too happy about that.
Anyway, I’m trying to edge my way into her area of expertise now; I think it might be a better fit with my skill set, as the recruitment people say. As far as I can see, all she does, apart from sitting in front of her computer, is wander around the shelves taking books down at random and putting them into envelopes. Well, I can do that – maybe not the envelope bit, but certainly the random removal. The odd thing is, she doesn’t really seem to appreciate that, either. It’s all in the management books; uncooperative colleagues with unhealthy attachments to their petty duties. I try bringing her my decapitated soft toys and half-digested chews, but she still doesn’t get it. Perhaps we need to instigate a quality circle…
The man next door drives a taxi, and consequently gets up and disappears in his car at a completely barbaric time in the morning. I’m told that it’s called half-past six, but I usually take great care to have nothing whatsoever to do with it. My razor-sharp auditory capabilities, combined with the analytical powers of my brain, ensure that his daily departure leaves me snoring placidly, with dreams undisturbed.
Yesterday, however, the taxi stopped at the end of the drive, which, to all extents and purposes is at that point also the end of our drive. My senses were immediately alert and I woke the household with a crescendo of sharp barking. The Dad came downstairs and together we ventured outside.
I mentioned heroism earlier, and no doubt you are by now on the edge of your keyboards, envisaging murder, kidnap or an outbreak of unbridled international terrorism. Well, it could have been any of those. Our valour is in no way diminished by the actuality of the matter, that the next-door neighbour had a, er, flat tyre.
The Dad is extremely au fait with punctures of every kind, as the Mum’s back bicycle tyre is in an almost perpetual state of flatness. (We could, if we were uncharitable, speculate about the weight placed on the saddle, but we’re not, so we won’t.) He even managed to get a bit of practice changing a car wheel when a pothole jumped out of an English road just before Christmas to attack his own Mum’s car while he was driving it. (Note to Auntie Jess: this was before your sojourn there and the Council kindly paid for a new tyre, so please don’t worry.) Anyway, the Dad helped Mr Taxi with the wheel, allowing me to have a really good snuffle round all the neighbours’ houses (we live in a cul-de-sac, making this easier) just like I’m not allowed to in daylight.
So, the moral of the story is; be bloody, bold and resolute. You can always catch up on your sleep later on.
We didn’t see most of the programme but caught up with it again by the end. By this time Keano had been transformed, according to the narrator, into a “good dog”. I couldn’t see any difference myself, though his house-humans were behaving in a much more civilised manner. But that couldn’t have been it, could it, or the programme would have been called People Borstal?
While I pondered over the conundrum, I tried honing my mind on a bit of Aidan’s geometry homework,
but I’m sorry to say I didn’t get very far.
It’s a good thing dogs don’t have to do the eleven-plus, even in Northern Ireland.
One good thing today, though. At the park there were two dogs, one Yorkshire Terrier and one a bit bigger, but still smaller than me. We formed ourselves into a gang, with me as the head, of course, being the biggest and hairiest, and were about to trash the neighbourhood, maybe a bit of graffiti, find ourselves some hooded sweatshirts… But then the Dad said it was time to go home. Rats.
I thought something else exciting was going to happen, when the Mum propped the fridge door open after supper. I bounded across the kitchen but then found that she’d taken all the food out, even the Melton Mowbray pork pie and salami. It turned out to be something called defrosting, which is probably Italian for rotten swizz.
Right on cue, I trotted in, dismembered teddy bear hanging from my jaws, ready for a good tug-of-war. Imagine my disappointment when I found it was just the beginning of one of their films. I tried everything; the entire contents of my toybox, jumping up and dancing on my hind legs, even making interesting little smells and noises from my bottom, but none of it did any good.
I don’t even understand the point of the film. They told me it was about the last king of Scotland but, as a Border Terrier, I do know a little about these things. Those landscapes were nothing like my ancestors’ descriptions of Northumberland. I’ll never fathom the peculiarities of these humans, not even if I watch their quantity of QI episodes.
