After trying and failing to get a professional to fix the section of fence of that was downed by storm “Gareth”, I ended up going DIY on it with the invaluable help of a very knowledgeable ex-engineer neighbor. Unfortunately it was not a quick job; in order to minimize costs and re-use the existing fence panels there was a lot of nail removal, sawing, digging and concreting involved, followed by the insertion of around 500 screws. In all it took a week: a week that left me exhausted, not just because of all the manual labor but also due to the relentless struggle to keep Beanie & Biggles contained on our property and out of the neighboring garden.

While working on the fence our two Beaglets periodically needed access to their outside loo, and this frequently brought me to a standstill as I had to keep them out of concrete-filled wheel barrows, away from rusty but still sharp nails, and retrieve one or both of them from their new supplementary garden.

Every day when work ended I grabbed some metal poles and a roll of green plastic mesh and did my utmost to erect a barrier across the big gap in the fence. While it was daylight and I was out there with them it seemed that my make-shift construction was going to work. I watched Beanie and Biggles probe and test my efforts, and retired to the house confident that I’d done enough to keep the two of them in our garden during short nighttime loo visits. I should have known better.

Not good Dad! I can’t get into our other garden!!

As soon as it got dark Beanie mysteriously gained the ability to teleport directly through the green mesh stuff whenever she wanted. I’d let her out of the kitchen door and watch her as she meandered down a safe distance from the fence, but if I turned away for a second I’d see nothing but empty garden when I looked back. Occasionally she’d re-appear by the time I’d donned my jacket and shoes and found my torch, but mostly I had to go on a Beanie retrieval mission into the neighbor’s garden; sometimes it would be 5-10 minutes before I’d return with a wriggling Beagle maggot in my arms. I found it particularly galling that while the mesh clearly didn’t inhibit The Beanster, it did stop me, forcing me to use the gate. Every. Single. Time.

Initially Biggles seemed to be defeated by the mesh, which was surprising because he’s certainly got enough raw grunt to just force himself through it, leaving a Bigglet sized hole. This apparent success made me over confident, and at one point I let him out and went back into the lounge to drink a coffee, not bothering to watch him at all. I finished the coffee in due course, and then remembered that I was one Beagle short. Opening the kitchen door I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him; I found him stuck on the other side of the green barrier, anxiously repeating the “knock-knock” woof he normally uses when coming back in from the garden. Fatigued by several prior Beanie retrievals I just marched straight over to the green stuff and extracted a couple of poles to make an opening, but before I could say anything to him he marched straight past me making a beeline for the kitchen door. He didn’t exactly break into a run, but he was trotting with the conspicuous urgency of someone who’d had a scare and was trying to hide it. While Beanie’s inbuilt teleporter was a two-way device, Biggles’ was apparently unidirectional and he’d only just found out. That’s what happens when you trade your hard-earned socks for the cheapest teleportation device on eBay without bothering to look at the feedback scores.

Over the next few days I put more and more effort into making my green barrier Beagle-proof. I grabbed extra sticks and poles and rammed them into the ground to tie it down, I laid heavy tools on top of the lower edge of the mesh, and I doubled it up to create a multi-layered construction, yet each evening Beanie continued to pass through the thing at will, leaving no obvious signs of how she’d done it. Biggles took a couple of nights to get over his trauma, but then he starting turning up in the neighbor’s garden too. I never did find out how they were doing it, but I was thoroughly relieved when the proper wooden fence was finally back up and full Beagle containment was restored. I got some pretty dirty looks from Beanie though; she wasn’t at all happy about losing her extended garden.