The world’s loudest doorbell and most insistent morning alarm – otherwise known as Daisy – has just had her second birthday.
She didn’t use to be so vocal; when she first came to us she was as timid and quiet as a mouse. We still see glimpses of that timidity: on a recent beach run Daisy’s extender lead slipped out of my rain-soaked grip and slid down Monkey’s lead before colliding unceremoniously with her bum. She yelped, tucked her tail and cowered like a still-traumatised rescue dog from an abusive home. I gave her a cuddle and a kiss to reassure her, and I half expected Monkey to come running to her aid but he didn’t; he was otherwise occupied with a challenging and artistic poo, carefully depositing his logs on a particularly high but narrow clump of grass. Perhaps Monkey has simply attended too many Daisy “emergencies” that turned out to be nothing of the sort. Regardless, once she’d had a sufficiently soppy moment with me she returned to her normal state: that of a cocky little street urchin with a princess complex.
In recent months she’s discovered her inner Biggles. Like our much-missed boy she loves to keep watch by the window and pass ear-splitting judgement on anyone and anything that dares to enter her field of view. Unlike Biggles, she’s such a short-arse that she has to mount the back of the sofa to see out of the window properly. Monkey of course is not the least bit height-challenged and can often be found alongside Daisy on the lower tier of the sofa, resting on his elbows for comfort when a gobbing-off lasts longer than expected.
Sometimes I feel you don’t fully appreciate the seriousness of the situation outside Dad!
Daisy has an inner Beanie too; she’s got a quartz-accurate internal timer for mealtimes, but since breakfast is so very important she’s taken to sounding the alarm a few minutes early each morning. It starts with an understated dripping-tap whimper, but can quickly escalate to a warbling scream if no humie gets out of bed to begin the serving process.
As soon as the bowls go down and the crates are opened she bursts out and sprints for all she’s worth, but Susan maintains that Daisy is still a long way from reaching Poppy’s legendary breakfast speed. Like a top-end sports car Poppy had the Beagle equivalent of launch control, and would drift her way through the corners to come to a perfectly executed skid-stop right over her bowl.
Speaking of speed-eating, there was plenty of that going on when Susan finished adding the mashed potato “icing” to a certain little miss’s birthday cake. Admittedly our version of the cake didn’t look quite like the photo on the Battersea website where I found the recipe, but Daisy and Monkey got very excited about it all the same.
The following shot is horribly out of focus, but it still captures the speed and efficacy of Daisy’s snatch-and-grab cake raids. Just as I was preparing to serve up her second slice – complete with meaty stick instead of a candle – she pogo-sticked to my shoulder-height and grabbed the stick along with a mouthful of mashed potato. Truly she now has the full Beagle skillset.
In the space of a couple of minutes the whole cake was in Beagle tummies and the plate it was resting on was scrupulously clean. You might think that a whole cake in one serving was a bit over-indulgent, but trust me they’d earned it on their walk up Loudoun hill the previous day!
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Their last visit to Loudoun had been some time ago so all the sniffs were new, intense and exciting. Also exciting was the guy who was chilling out by the summit trig point; he was wearing a bright orange Beanie hat and every time he sat up, that little orange blob popped into view and drove Monkey and Daisy wild. There was much woofing from both of them, but predictably it was Daisy who contributed the most noise pollution. This was Daisy for the first 20 minutes after we got back home:
An announcement from the palace: HRH Princess Daisy is properly knackered!
Normal operations were of course restored the next day, once the cake had been digested and the sun had come out!
There’s never a bad time to have a Beagle birthday, but early March is I think particularly good; the days are getting longer, the sun’s putting in more appearances, and all the early bulbs are starting to show. What better time to celebrate the bright little girl who came into our lives when we needed her and made all of us – Monkey especially – happy again.
