Every morning in our house starts with a bang. Several bangs in fact, typically around six o’clock in the morning. These bangs are Beanie pounding her paw against the front of her crate; her way of telling us she wants to be let into our bed. Once she’s in there our sleep remains disturbed as she repeatedly changes her mind about whether to be above or below the covers, or tries to shove one of us out so she can lie horizontally. When we finally give in and commit to getting up, we then have to deal with her brother, Biggles.

Biggles has an entirely different morning routine. The moment you approach his crate he rolls over onto his back, and refuses to get out until his tummy has been sufficiently tickled. At least I assume it’s a tummy tickle he’s after. I suppose it could also be his first waking reaction to the lethal fumes his little bottom has been generating all night. Either way, you have to kneel there and tickle away for a couple of minutes until he emerges, then quickly usher him downstairs and out into the garden before he’s tempted to use the Beagle en-suite (the left hand side of our chest of drawers) for his first pee of the day.

Here’s my first attempt to capture the Biggles part of the routine on video. I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the clip; I’m not too good with the camera that early in the morning, the light level is very poor, and those Biggles fumes are quite potent:

Of course the fact that I was filming piqued Beanie’s interest, and when Beanie’s on the move Biggles always follows suit, so this is a much shortened version of the morning ticklefest.