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!

I’ve always taken pride in brushing the pups’ teeth regularly; in past years I’ve even been complimented by the vet for keeping up with their dental hygiene. Well, you know what they say about pride, although sadly the fall which followed my pride happened to Beanie rather than me. I can’t remember the exact circumstances of the fall (it could have been a slip as she dived off one of the office chairs, or a misstep as she sprinted up the stairs to the deck) but I do remember checking to see if she was alright. It appeared she was – she seemed to brush it off immediately – but in reality it must have knocked out two of her lower front teeth, and though this happened much earlier in the year, I only found out about the missing teeth last week. Worse still, I probably wouldn’t know about them even now if Susan hadn’t spotted the tooth-free gap while rescuing a stolen vegetable plant.

I’ve since discovered that in addition to the tooth loss, the rest of her front teeth aren’t looking as clean as they should. Admittedly there tends to be quite a lot of wriggling during the tooth-brushing process so much of it has to be done by feel rather than by sight, but it’s obvious I need to put more effort into cleaning and periodically eyeballing the front teeth as well as the canines and molars. To mark the start of my new, more conscientious doggy dental care routine I’ve switched to a better toothpaste, got a fresh brush and bought a couple of pots of Plaque-off.

While all of this will help both Beanie and Biggles hold on to their gnashers going forward, I get the feeling Beanie would have preferred something tastier and more immediately rewarding as compensation for her  mishap. She swallowed all her baby teeth as a little pup instead of leaving them under her pillow, so she’s certainly overdue for a visit from the tooth fairy.

Biggles’s life has had its ups and downs recently also. He’s always shown a liking for camping chairs, so recently Susan parked one right by my desk and lined it with our furriest tartan blankie. He needed no invitation to get onto it, and over the next few days it became his favorite hangout.

To be honest I loved having it there too. Biggles just looked so right in it, like it was his own tailor-made Beagle hammock. Unfortunately that chair also put its furry occupant in an ideal position for nicking things from my desk. For some days Biggles either didn’t realize it had this extra feature, or at least didn’t take advantage of it, but then one afternoon, when I was battling a really frustrating bug in my Android app, he went through one of his “I’ve got to get stuff!” phases. He became obsessed with some important papers on the corner of my desk, and made several attempts to nab them. Each time I told him firmly “No!” but when he’s in one his moods, the word “No” comes through as “keep trying different approaches”.

He never got the papers but every snatch attempt inflicted collateral damage, whether it was my phone crashing to the floor, or various usb devices getting ripped from their sockets, or just my concentration getting nuked yet again. Eventually I gave him an ultimatum: “Right! One more naughty nicking attempt and I’m going to confiscate your chair!”

Of course that one more attempt did happen, so I carried through on my threat, folding up his chair and carrying it to another room. Even as I was taking the chair away, an alarm bell sounded in my head. Had I remembered to push my own chair in under the desk before I picked up his Lordship’s luxury hammock? I got my answer even before I made it back to my desk, because Biggles passed me carrying my favorite hot chocolate mug in his mouth as he trotted purposefully to his place for checking out new acquisitions. Only recently I’d re-watched The Untouchables and one of Sean Connery’s best lines immediately popped into my head:

“You wanna get Capone? Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. He takes your favorite camping chair, you take his favorite hot chocolate mug!”

Once he’d finished purging the chocolate dregs from my mug, Biggles went into a big sulk over the continued absence of his chair. I fixed my coding bug and lasted nearly 24 hours before I caved and restored his special seating arrangements. To date there haven’t been any more nicking attempts; I get to keep my papers and my mug on my desk, and he gets to keep his big furry bum on his tartan-lined hammock. I think we’ve reached an understanding.

Now if only I could flush the guilt I still feel over being unaware of Beanie’s tooth mishap…

This innocent looking little boy has become quite a handful over the last couple of weeks. He’s always been prone to having the odd “I’ve got to get something” moment, where he prowls the house looking for something to nab, but currently we can count on him going into klepto mode several times a day. Empty yoghurt pots and plastic milk containers have now joined socks as his most prized items, which is problematic as we’re using them extensively as temporary homes for Susan’s ongoing vegetable and fruit-growing project.

She takes great care to purge any trace of food from the containers, hand-washing them first and following that with a round in the dishwasher, but still Biggles finds them highly desirable. His raids start off with uncharacteristic stealth; he sneaks into Susan’s office when she’s occupied and quietly browses her store of clean pots, then mayhem ensues as he brute-forces his way to his chosen target. I tend to hear rather observe the raids; very often I have my head down working on code when suddenly there’s a series of thuds and crashes, followed by Biggles’ trademark urgent trot and Susan shouting through to me “Paul, he’s got one again, can you get it off him?”

I’ve been trying to work out what’s behind this increase in his kleptomaniac tendencies; it’s certainly not lack of attention because he’s never had so many tummy rubs and ear-fondles. I think perhaps I’ve made both him and Beanie fitter in my attempts to compensate for the loss of their beach runs. Their daily exercise now includes going round the perimeter of one of our local farmer’s big fields, a field so overgrown that at points the grass exceeds my knee height. I have to really pick my feet up to make good progress, and the pups get an even better workout; Beanie uses a bounding motion like a stone skipping over water, while Biggles stoically hammers his way through it.

Periodically their legs get a rest while the focus switches to intense core exercises, which coincidentally result in something smelly being deposited on furry necks and shoulders.

This is followed more often than not by a session in our latest dog-related extravagance, a big paddling pool. Some time ago Beanie had problems with weakness in her back legs, and a canine physio advised lots of slow, deliberate wading in deep water. I followed this advice religiously every time we were at the beach, and it worked, restoring Beanie to her normal sure-footed and athletic self. I saw this progress starting to unravel when the coronavirus lockdown stopped access to the beach, so now we have a surrogate beach on our patio.

Spurred on by kibble rewards the pups walk round it repeatedly, alternating direction each time, then do lengths. It’s not the same as wading through the sea against the wind and waves but it is helping to keep Beanie’s rear end strong. I’m sure it also feels great on hot sunny days when little Beagles may regret having non-removable furry romper suits.

I reckon this adds up to an overall increase in exercise for the pups and the more exercise they get, the more energy they seem to have; Beanie is often seen leaping on to the table on our deck in search of food remnants, while Biggles has more go-juice for his raiding and pillaging activities. Sadly it doesn’t quite seem to work that way for me, but at least I am getting better at crashing out on the sofa for daytime naps.