I was all set for a good night’s sleep; all four pups were in bed and a chorus of overlapping snoring had begun. All the electrics were turned off, the doors were locked and the alarm was on. I just had to brush my teeth, collapse into bed and surrender to my fatigue.

Whimper. Whimper. Cry.

It was coming from Poppy’s crate. “Please Poppy, not now” I whispered, hoping that I’d merely disturbed her and that she’d soon settle back down.

Whimper. Whimper. Cry.

“Ignore it for a just a couple of minutes more and see if it stops” I thought.

Whimper. Whimper. Cry.

It was a little louder this time, more insistent, and I knew she wasn’t going to settle.

“OK, I’ll let you out for one more garden visit, but make it quick!”. As I was about to be reminded, that’s  exactly the kind of thing you don’t want to say to a female Beagle when you’re desperate for bed. On went the lights, off went the alarm, and doors where unlocked. Poppy trotted  out into the garden with some haste so I was hopeful that this was a legitimate and necessary toilet outing. She disappeared from view as she went down the steps, and I waited. Sleep was creeping over me and I started swaying on my feet, so I figured I would keep myself busy until she came back. I picked up a cup and couple of teaspoons and popped them into the dishwasher, then peered through the door to check if I could see The Popster, but the LED lights in the kitchen were overwhelming the ambient light outdoors and I couldn’t make out anything in the lower part of the garden. Whatever Poppy was doing, she wasn’t ready to come back in yet.

Looking for something else to do to stay awake, I started going through a short kicking routine – about the only the thing I’ve kept going from my Karate days. I got through the front kicks quickly, and there was no Poppy. I worked through some slow side kicks, but still she hadn’t made it back. I went to the door, opened it briefly and called to her, carefully balancing the volume level so that it would reach Poppy’s ears (hopefully) without disturbing the neighbors. I saw no movement, save for  a few midges and other night-time insects bouncing off the door glass. I didn’t want to go out there to get nibbled, so I resolved to give my girly a couple more minutes. I started on back kicks to kill the time; they’re a risky venture in a confined space with various breakables on the worktops, doubly-so in my half-conscious state, but still I had to stay awake until Poppy was back in the house, so.. desperate measures for desperate times and all that. I got through ten reps on each leg without accidentally hitting anything, but Poppy was still AWOL.

Finally I’d hit my limit; that naughty little girl was coming in whether she was ready or not, and if I had to get nibbled by the midges, well so be it. I stuffed my feet into my garden clogs and marched out of the door. I didn’t have to go far before I found her – she was lying on the lawn have a merry little chew session with a cow hoof.

“Oi! Poppy! Get in now!”

She looked at me with an innocent “what?” expression, then picked up her hoof and trotted quickly and obediently into the kitchen. I followed her, and saw her heading out of the kitchen and down the corridor towards our bedroom, still carrying her hoof. “Fair enough” I thought, “she can have her hoof in her crate if she wants”. I locked the door, primed the alarm and turned off the lights. When I got to the bedroom I bent down to check she was in her crate, but it was empty. I checked around the bed and in the bathroom but wherever she was, Poppy wasn’t here. “The little bugger’s doubled back!” I muttered to myself, trying not to wake Susan or disturb any of the other Beaglets.

On went the lights and off went the alarm again. I found Poppy on a sofa in the lounge, still chewing away on her hoof. “Right missus, your number’s up” I told her. I confiscated the hoof and – taking no more chances – scooped her up in my arms. Alarm on again, lights off again, and Poppy deposited back in her crate with the door locked securely behind her. Time, at long last, for bed! I expected to fall asleep immediately, but for one thing I was too stimulated and for another I fully expected another Beagle to pipe up, requesting his or her own midnight adventure. That didn’t happen fortunately, and eventually the rhythmic pack snoring dispatched me to the land of nod.

Throughout his life Biggles has set himself some pretty ambitious goals. His success in achieving those goals has been a bit patchy. For example, he’s never caught living prey such as birds, squirrels or cats, but he has caught lots of socks and once laid claim to a dead cow on the beach. One thing that has eluded him consistently is to pee on Beanie’s head. I’ve never understood why that’s on his to-do list, but it must be important to him because he’s made so many attempts. Regardless, he pulled off something so remarkable a few days ago – something so not-even-in-your-dreams extreme that Beanie’s urine-free head no longer bothers him. He actually managed to poop on Poppy’s head.

In truth this noteworthy achievement owes as much to Poppy’s small stature and addiction to eating the brown stuff as it does to Biggles’ defecation skills, but still I’m sure it gives him a claim to fame that few other Beagles can match.

It happened just a few minutes in to a routine tea-time walk. Monkey had just laid down a challenge to Biggles by delivering an unfeasibly large collection of bottom sausages, and I’d fought off both Poppy and Monkey to get the better part of them into a bag. I’d just tied off the bag and had the nearest bin in my sights when Biggles decided to respond. He squatted and opened the bomb bay doors, but his initial serving paled into insignificance compared to Monkey’s offering. Biggles was far from finished however; even as Poppy, Monkey and my bag-covered hand moved in on that first instalment, Biggles shuffled forward like a golfer preparing for a putt and delivered part two. I managed to beat the pups to the first dollop, but now the race was on for the second one. Once more my hand got there first, but Poppy was getting very determined not to lose out again and Biggles still wasn’t finished.  He shuffled forward again to deliver part three. Unlike its predecessors, part three was getting a bit loose (isn’t it always the case that the sequels are never as good as the original?) and as I struggled to scoop it up, Biggles was already repositioning for part four, and Poppy was ready for it. She swooped in to pick it up, leaving her head directly below Biggles’ delivery chute. Out came part five, straight on to Poppy’s head. It had the consistency of Greek yoghurt, and formed a disk as it landed. Positioned fashionably off to the right side of Poppy’s bonce, it resembled a beret – a poo beret rather than the raspberry beret that Prince used to rave about. Poppy seemed completely oblivious to its presence, and for a moment I was so mesmerised by the sight of it that I couldn’t do anything but stand there motionless. When I finally stirred to action, I wasn’t sure how best to clean it up: use a bag, and risk smearing the beret all over Poppy’s head, or go in with a tissue to minimize the spread. I went for the tissue, and it worked out quite well save for a bit of bleed-through onto my fingers.

A few days later Poppy continued her pursuit of repulsive fashion items. We were on our way back from a beach run, and on the track ahead of us I spotted the remains of a rabbit. Our local beachpark is overrun by rabbits, so its not unusual to see the odd bunny carcass. This particular one had been thoroughly gutted, boned and bifurcated at the waist; what was left looked like pair of rabbit trousers, size: extra small. As soon as I saw it, I knew that at least one of our Beagles would be keen to get it, so I locked off the extender leads and took a wide detour. Biggles lunged for it but I pulled him clear, and breathed a sigh of relief that we’d dodged it. A few steps later I glanced to my left and saw Poppy bounding through the sand and over-grown grass with the rabbit pants flapping in her mouth. It wasn’t easy to get them off her, I can tell you.

The poo beret had been gross, the rabbit pants had been even more gross, but the award for most disgusting Beagle-related event that week was won by The Beanster. On the very next beach run, she spent some quality time with a dead seal that had been buried by the council some months ago and uncovered either by the tide, or by a very big dog with a talent for digging. I pulled her clear as soon as I could but she still stank out the house for hours after, and just as that stink was subsiding, she barfed on our rug. The smell wasn’t quite as bad as that old Beagle favourite “shitvom” (regurgitated, partially digested poop) but it has hung around for some days now, no matter how much we’ve scrubbed at the rug.

When it comes to disgusting smells..

.. Beanie is still top dog!

A while back I wrote that our older pups are more of  a handful than our young ones. That is no longer the case due in no small part to Monkey’s conkers, or as I prefer to call them, his Spherical Ideas Department (SID). It’s plain that they’ve started talking to him – giving all manner of novel and often unwise suggestions – and he’s all ears.

Monkey’s most noteworthy SID-inspired projects include:

• Chowing down on toilet brushes and when apprehended by a humie, insisting on giving said humie a big slobbery kiss (because they really like that second-hand toilet brush juice).
• Stealing poo bags out of my trouser pocket. This in itself is hardly a unique Beagle project, but the skill level Monkey displays with his pick-pocketing is truly remarkable. He’s got a big, clumsy mouth but somehow he can sneak the bags out of my pocket without me feeling a thing. I only realise I’ve been hit when I hear the crinkling as he gets to work on his ill-gotten yet artfully obtained prizes.
• Sticking his head through the livestock fence we’ve erected around our vegetable growing area, and getting stuck.
• Wooing Beanie. This is one of the most dangerous things to come out of the Spherical Ideas Department, not least because the conkers-recommended wooing technique involves slapping Beanie’s head with a big heavy paw. In fairness this hasn’t got Monkey into trouble just yet, but as I keep reminding my boy: “There are old Monkeys and there are bold Monkeys, but there are no old, bold Monkeys that don’t have bite marks on their bottoms.”
• Peeing and pooing in the house. Yes, just as we thought Monkey had put his house-soiling habits to bed, the SID re-awakened them. The first of this new wave of accidents came shortly after I spotted Monkey un-weighting one of his rear legs during a pee. It was the beginning of a leg-cock, so maybe he was experimenting with territory marking; that would explain the peeing, but not the in-house number twos. Regardless, we seem to be getting the house-training back on track now.
• Shoulder-barging Biggles on a walk. Monkey is now – at six months old – bigger and heavier than Biggles(!), but Biggles was right up for a bit of manly shoulder-bumping and instantly responded in kind. This scared the hell out of Monkey, and the shoulder barging project was shelved thereafter. Maybe in his head Monkey still sees himself as a tiny pup, dwarfed and awed by the adult Beagles in his pack. Alternatively, maybe he realized that there’s a reason why Biggles often stands with his rear legs really wide apart: his balls may be virtual rather than physical but they’re enormous, giving the Bigglet a vastly superior Spherical Ideas Department. Competing with that level of silly would be like Justin Bieber trying to break Ozzy Osborne’s records for wrecking hotel rooms.

In spite of all this hormone-inspired silliness, we’ve decided that Monkey will retain his full pocket billiards set; for the most part he’s calmer and easier to handle than Biggles ever was, and not overly confident. Poppy of course has been spayed and never had any conkers to start with, but she’s still capable of coming up with her own naughty ideas. Like Beanie she loves to wreck plants, and when we put plastic green fencing around planting areas to protect them, she made it her mission to nibble her way through it and wreak havoc on the vulnerable seedlings within.

Back when we’d first got Poppy I entertained the idea that she was actually an alien – a Nibblosian from the Plant Nibble who could spawn more Beagles by doing a head stand in a plant pot. She’s now displaying another alien characteristic that could have come straight out of Ridley Scott most famous movie: she’s a face hugger. She likes nothing more than to climb onto a humie shoulder for a cuddle, and once there, cover the humie’s mouth and nose with her head and neck, stifling breathing. Seriously, I don’t think it would be wise to leave Poppy alone in a room with a sleeping baby or someone who wouldn’t be able to push her off their face!

EDIT: My idea of equating Biggles to Ozzy Osborne seems to have been about right. The day after I made this post, we went out to work on the garden without properly closing the kitchen baby gate. Some time later Susan spotted Biggles in the kitchen and sent me in to check on things,  usher him back to the lounge and close the gate. As I stood in the doorway to the kitchen I didn’t see any overt signs of Biggly boy activity, but when I took a step inside I heard a crunching noise underfoot: broken glass. In fact Biggles had knocked two pint-sized glasses onto the floor, smashing them. As I cleaned that up I noticed a Jacobs Cream Cracker wrapper lying in the hall, and found a trail of crumbs all the way up the corridor to the bedroom. Clothes had been thrown around the bedroom floor, and in the ensuite the toilet roll holder had been ripped off the wall, but curiously the toilet roll itself was lying mostly undamaged on the floor. All that would have made for a respectable Ozzy-style wrecking session, but Biggles had left one more surprise for me: in the family bathroom off the hall there was an empty bag of sultanas. As it happened I knew for sure that the bag had been mostly empty prior to Biggles getting it because I’d put a handful of the remaining sultanas on my cereal that morning. No need for an emergency dash to the vet then, but this was nevertheless an impressive path of destruction and chaos for a nearly 14 year old Beagle boy, and it served as proof that even if you have no balls you can still have a spherical ideas department that’s the size of two small planets stuck together.

More shots from the last couple of weeks: