We’ve actually had a summer! It seems like it’s pretty much over now, but we’ve had one, and Team Beagle has made the most of it. Each immature crab apple that’s fallen from the tree has been grabbed, thrown back into the air and rolled on multiple times! No fresh tea towel has stayed long in our kitchen drawer before being nicked and paraded round the garden!

Over the last few weeks Daisy has become my bathroom buddy, always following me into the little room. I wish I could say she’s doing that because she loves me, but the truth is it’s all about my pants, or more specifically the pockets in my pants. The moment I drop my trousers for my daily constitutional, a snout is pushed into the right hand pocket where I usually keep a handful of biccies. It’s very cute, but it doesn’t help me accomplish the task I went in there to perform; sometimes a degree of concentration is required to get the job done – so to speak – and wiggly little Beagle girls are not at all conducive to this.

As for Monkey, well he’s become much better at nicking things from the kitchen. Just this morning he scored a sizeable chunk of butter – complete with it’s wrapper – and every missing tea towel has been his work. He nicks ’em from the kitchen, then Daisy nicks ’em from him and does a high speed tour of the garden. For some reason the tea towels seem to happen most when I’m working on the garden. It’s as though an unspoken conversation goes on between us:

Me: OK pups I’m just going out and mow the rear lawn now.
Monkey: Right Dad, just give me a second and I’ll get the tea towel!

To be honest I don’t think Monkey really understands the conventional uses of tea towels; I mean obviously they’re needed if you’re mowing the lawn, but also he brought one out when I was painting the deck railings with preservative, which was just plain silly. I tried to explain that to him but the grin on his face replied “I can’t help it Dad! I’m a Monkey Dad!”.

More summer moments:

On hotter days tasty frozen ice cubes have been greatly appreciated – even by Monkey, once he got over suspicion that they were some form of Monkeycide!

It’s alive! That tea towel is alive! But Daisy can fix that…

More crab apple fun

I think you’re supposed to catch it Daisy, not wear it..

Beware! Low flying Monkey!

This humping thing is more complicated than it looks. First you’ve got to get the right end, then you’ve got to find some way to climb up..

She’s doing it again Dad!

Chillin’ and letting it all hang out..

Snoozes in the shade..

Daisy keeps a lookout while Monkey attempts to use his bed-making skills on the chair.

Once settled in the chair, one must keep a suspicious eye out for falling leaves (and tiny crab apples)

Too knackered to do anything! Maybe this whole summer thing is overrated..

And finally, a quick blast of summer flowers..

It’s July – a month that in our part of the world usually means unrelenting heavy rain – but incredibly we’re enjoying something that actually qualifies as a “summer” : it’s warm but not crazy hot, it’s sunny and its dry. However, between the short but unpleasant heatwave I wrote about in my last post and this current blissful spell, we did have a short monsoon season. During the rain Daisy suffered her way through the worst walk in the entire history of Beagles. It was so bad it’s a wonder she survived, and we’re still dealing with the fallout from it.

There’s no gentle way to talk around what happened, so I’ll just come straight out with it: I put a raincoat on Daisy. It was one of a pair of quality raincoats that had served Beanie and Biggles very well, so I didn’t expect the wearing of it to be so traumatic for Daisy, but it was.

There were two major problems with it. Firstly it was hopelessly out of fashion, and apparently Daisy really cares about being in fashion. The second – more practical problem – was with the elastic leg straps. Since Daisy is such a short-arse, the straps were loose. I decided initially not to put her legs through them, but they kept tapping her rear legs as she walked, so then I tried fitting them properly. This was much worse! In no time at all Daisy managed to tangle her legs in the straps; at one point she even had both her legs through the same strap and was staggering around like some strange bondage Beagle. I shortened and tightened the straps by knotting them which prevented any further leg tangling calamities, but the damage was already done: this was unashamed Daisycide, and it was far worse than Monkeycide. Daisy was dry but livid when she got home; later that day she took a leaf out of the BPM (Beanie Protest Manual) and peed both our bed and her own. If Monkey’s crate hadn’t been closed, she’d probably have peed his bed too.

I changed our bed and Daisy’s, loaded the washing machine, and I decided it would be prudent to withdraw free Beagle access to our bedroom for a day or two. As I’ve noted before Monkey can open any door with a lever handle, so merely closing the door was not going to be enough. I hunted down one of the wooden handle locks I’d made some time ago, stuck my head in the bedroom to check that it was free of Beagles, closed it and popped the lock on, then sat down for a web surf with a well-earned coffee.

A couple of minutes later I heard energetic rummaging noises and assumed that it was Monkey in the toilet, raiding our toilet roll stash as he is wont to do. I really couldn’t be arsed going to chase him out of the toilet, so I just called out a loud generic “Oi!”. The rummaging noises stopped for a moment, but only for a moment, and when they resumed they were accompanied by a muffled yet jubilant “woof!!!”. Muffled woof’s are always a sign of the kind of Beagle activity that requires intervention – especially if they’re jubilant – so I put down my coffee and went to check the toilet. It was empty. There was only one other place the noises could be coming from: the bedroom. Apparently my spot check for Beagles had not been sufficiently thorough, and I’d actually locked Monkey in the bedroom. I took the lock off the handle, opened the door and saw Monkey on the bed with a classic “I wasn’t doing nothing Dad, honest!” look on his face.

Clearly he had been doing something, probably a few somethings. The bed clothes were messed up and pillows had been thrown about a bit, but there was nothing that would take more than a second to fix, and nothing that would have merited the muffled woof. It was at this point that I that I saw Bonzo II, a big doggy-shaped hot water bottle cover that Susan had made for Poppy when she was a little pup.

Bonzo hasn’t seen use in some time, and generally sleeps on top of the crates as a decoration. He wasn’t on top of the crates now though; he was on the floor, and though his features are sewn on I would have to say his expression looked a bit shocked. He still had all his paws, his tail, and even his ears, but on closer inspection I noticed a brown stain on Bonzo’s bottom, right at the hot water bottle entry point. Obviously I’ll never know quite how Bonzo came by that stain, but I do know that he joined the queue for the washing machine. And the free bedroom access ban is still in effect, for both of ’em.

Last week – for the first time in 18 years of being Beagle carers – we had to skip walkies because of heat. In the past we’ve always found ways to let the pups safely have their walk even on the hottest days. We’ve shifted our times, used cooling jackets, gone wading at the beach and found shaded, cool woodland trails – but on Thursday the heat was so overwhelming that the only safe thing to do was stay home. Living on the west coast of Scotland we got a much shorter, milder version of the heatwave that swept through europe and our temperatures topped out at just over 30c, but that still felt bad enough.

To help our furries get through it we gave them multiple servings of meat-flavoured ice cubes and food-filled frozen kongs. This was Daisy’s first ever encounter with a kong; as soon as I held it out to her she grabbed it and ran off into the garden, but then we observed an interesting bit of role reversal between her and Monkey. The Monkster – who is typically wary of anything unusual – settled straight down and began licking; he’d encountered a kong before, subjected it to a battery of rigorous scientific analytical tests, and come to the conclusion that it was not a Monkeycide attempt. It was safe, and knew what to do with it. Daisy however was completely flummoxed, and while I doubt she had any fear of it, she didn’t see the point in it, because contained no food she immediately access. She sat down with it and scratched her head, then looked across at Monkey; he was holding his kong firmly between his paws, licking away at it and apparently thoroughly enjoying it.

It only took a few seconds of observation before the penny dropped and Daisy knew what she had to do: she had to nick Monkey’s kong, because hers was crap and his was clearly way, way better! And that’s just what she did – several times in fact – but each time she “swapped” kongs with Monkey she ended up with the rubbish one.  Just as she was about to give up on the whole thing, the relentless sun melted the kongs just enough to expose the little nuggets of food held within, and Daisy finally got the kong that had been intended for her! Proof, if any were needed, that nicking stuff off your brother is always the best policy.

Being a naughty, entitled little princess is a valid life choice, especially if you always get away with it!

More recent pics:

Strawberries are so much easier to handle than frozen kongs!

Having his kong repeatedly stolen did nothing to disrupt Monkey & Daisy’s relationship. He still loves her, and of course she still loves her too.

On other days during the heatwave, shaded woodland trails were enough to keep the pups comfortable…

…and (mostly) entertained.

And when the walk isn’t quite enough, you can still do something silly like have a chase..

..or howl your head off at the cows on the nearby farm!