This post is a bit late, but it took me ages to get all our Christmas photos processed. Christmas 2022 marks our first year with four Beagles.

It’s a year that’s seen us put more baby gates and blocks of carefully cut 2 x 4 blocks on our doors (Monkey control), a livestock fence around our vegetable garden (Monkey and Poppy) and criss-cross wires on every aperture in that fence (Poppy specifically, ‘cos she’s so small and wiggly). We’ve also had to move the indoor wood stores for our stove, because they’re even chewier than hooves, and order 12kg bags of dog food at a rate 2 per month because Poppy’s stomach is such a bottomless pit compared to Monkey, who could survive on the fluff in your pocket for a week (or maybe I’ve got that the wrong way round). It’s also the year in which Biggles’s voice has gone all soprano while Beanie can do a decent impersonation of Frau Farbissina from the Austin Powers movies.

Guess how many times I have to untangle leads on a typical walk!
Whatever number you came up with, it’s more than that.

What Christmas 2022 moment sticks in my memory the most? Oddly it’s Poppy getting her Christmas dinner. Ordinarily when you give one of our Beagles something really, really nice in their bowls the wagging stops, concentration goes to maximum and there’s a silence so intense it’s almost deafening. The heads go down into the bowls and don’t come back up until those bowls are so clean that not even a scanning electronic microscope could find any residual food molecules. Poppy’s approach was very different: she nosed each component of the meal, then carefully lifted her roasted potato out onto  the deck, followed by the turkey, then after a moment of deliberation began munching through her brussels sprouts. You could almost hear her internal dialogue:

“Oooh what have I got? Potato – oh yeah I like those, I’ll save that until later. And Turkey, that’ll be nice, I’ll have it after my potato. Sprouts – yes I’ll have those now and wash them down with a quick slurp of gravy”

Needless to say Monkey finished his nosh in record time, and  was then faced with a terrible moral dilemma. His bowl was empty, while Poppy’s still had stuff in it. Would it really be so naughty to nick a bit of his sister’s food?  A few times he looked back and forth between his bowl and Poppy’s and then looked at Susan as if to ask her permission. Said permission was not given of course, so there was a bit of “OooooWoooWooo” (aka “It’s so unfair!!”). That’s Monkeycide folks. Again. Even at Christmas.

The shots:

Happy New Year to everyone and their woofers!