There are some things that Biggles is very good at. For example, he can recognize the the sound the doors make in our house when they are opened and closed. This tells him when one of us has been too preoccupied to close the kitchen door properly. His tactical brain tells him not to take immediate advantage of the resulting opportunity for exploration and acquisition; it’s better to let the humie get further away from the door before making a move. When he eventually sets out on his raiding mission, his powerful back legs and well-honed boinging technique allow him to reach anything on the counter-tops. Only items in the higher cupboards are truly out of his reach. It’s such a shame then that with all these talents at his disposal, he’s so absolutely crap at reliably targeting the high value items.

Earlier this week we returned from a shopping expedition with bags full of goodies for a special day. I dumped some of the shopping bags on the kitchen worktops and opted to delay the unpacking until after a cuppa, during the making of which the kitchen door was left ajar. We were sat on our bums and several slurps into said cuppas when the unmistakable sound of Biggles launching himself at the worktops sent Susan running to the kitchen. She was too late to prevent the theft, and as Biggles scurried down his corridor of doom it was not immediately obvious what his lordship had nicked. I joined her and we quickly searched the shopping bags for the most obvious targets.

Marshmallows? Still present. Finger rolls for hotdogs? Also untouched, as were the hotdogs themselves, the eggs (valued for the mess broken eggs create rather than the joy of eating them), and various other high value items. What exactly had Biggles nabbbed? His emergency trot to the corridor made it clear that he had indeed come away with something. Looking round I spotted a little bag of cherry tomatoes on the floor, ripped open, with a few its former inmates strewn around. I went to pick them up but was beaten to it by Beanie, who had cast off her favorite blankie to go see what all the commotion was about. She grabbed one of the tomatoes, burst it, decided it wasn’t even worth the effort of consumption and dropped it in disgust.

Subsequent examination of the carpet in the corridor revealed that my boy had gone through with eating at least one tomato, but in gameshow terms he’d come away with the losers T-shirt, the commemorative mug, or thinking back to UK TV’s 3-2-1, he’d got the booby prize known as “Dusty Bin”. Oddly enough he seemed happy enough with this outcome, but then again as Susan said, Beagles always like bins, whether they’re “Dusty” or not.

Thanks to Biggles’ poor decision making we still have treats for our special day, and despite some heckling from the furry naysayers, we’ll be able to enjoy those treats on the results of my second lockdown joinery project. More about that in the next post!