For some years now we’ve felt the desire to go against the flow at Christmas; one year we tried to spend December 25th up in the mountains, but foul weather derailed that plan. This time around we’ve taken the time, effort and expense that normally goes into Christmas and poured it into decoration of a different kind. Instead of putting up trees and tinsel, we’ve painted and re-tiled our kitchen!

Despite this success we still had to observe some Christmas traditions: we’ve done the ritual exchange of cards and of course there have been presents – at least for the furry members of our family.

That thing under Beanie’s paw is a rolled up edition of The Daily Dog. It has everything you’d expect from a doggy tabloid: all the latest gossip on celebrity dogs, articles on food, a photo of a Bassett with huge ears, a squeaker embedded in the centrefold – and crucially this particular edition also has.. a crinkly bit.

Beanie absolutely loves loves anything that crinkles, and this new toy has been an instant hit. Amazingly it’s proved to be quite durable too, though I did have a to step in a couple of times when harmless play threatened to tip over into wanton destruction.

Biggles is very much a traditionalist when it comes to toys; the crinkle didn’t interest him in the slightest, but when he found the squeak he suddenly felt the need to read this new publication in the privacy of his Corridor of Doom.

If anybody wants me, I’ll be in my office. Squeaking. A lot.

The Daily Dog was followed by a serving of filled bones, and I’ve got to be honest, those bones were in part a present to ourselves. For two hours after they were delivered we were able to go about our work in the kitchen without anybody sneaking in and playing at being a furry paint-roller.

One evening later in the festive period I was called away from our DIY project by an explosion of woofing in the living room. On my way to investigate I pondered what had triggered the noisy outburst. I half expected to find Biggles engaged in a heated negotiation with Beanie over a sock that he’d just pilfered from the laundry basket, but instead both of them were woofing directly at the blind-covered front window.  The woofing paused briefly as I entered the room, and I heard raised voices and car doors slamming in the street outside. I figured it was just Christmas revellers visiting our neigbors and thought nothing more of it, until the following morning that is.

I’d got up really late and Susan was just returning with Beanie & Biggles after their first walk. One or both of them had just put black, almost tar-like pawprints on the wooden floor (trivial to clean) and on the hall rug (not so easy to clean). I assumed it was mud, but when Susan told me what she’d learned from the neighbors, I realized that it was bulls**t. Literally the poo from a bull. That commotion I’d heard the previous evening? That was the sound of local farmers trying to herd one their prize beasts out of our street and back to where it belonged. During the bull’s visit some lawns had suffered hoof damage, but ours had been the lucky recipient of an all-you-can-eat-and-roll-in poo buffet.

So there you have it. You can refuse to put up a tree and tinsel, you can re-decorate your house instead of sitting in front of crap TV shows while trying to digest a week’s worth of food eaten in one day, but no matter how hard you try you still have to deal with Christmas bulls**t.

Ever since Susan started winning against her hip osteoarthritis, other OA sufferers have been enouraging her to write a book. The work on that book started some time ago, but intensified massively over the last couple of months as we prepared to submit to Amazon’s self-publishing programme. Part of this preparation included a photoshoot to illustrate the various physiotherapy exercises, and it was while processing the resulting shots that I realized just how often we must leave the house with our clothes covered in pubic hairs. Not our own I hasten to add; we’re both slobs with zero appreciation for fashion, but we do still have some standards! No, I’m talking about Beagle pubes. They’re white, they’re straight rather than curly, and you could technically refer to them as fur rather than hair, but they’re still pubes. I had to digitally remove a ton of them from the calves of Susan’s leggings in each of the book’s seventy-four photos, and I still haven’t a clue how they all got there…

To break up the tension from all that hard work – in a way that didn’t involve shedding even more short-but-not-curlies – I took the pups on a trip to our favorite destination when the weather is grim: Knock Hill, near Largs.

The very first time we journeyed up the hill we followed the circular route on the WalkHighlands website. This is an absurdly long 13km, much of which is spent on pavements in Largs. We skipped most of the town-based section this time and got straight into the countryside, but still had to run the gauntlet of aggressive free-range chickens on our way through Brisbane Mains farm. Beanie and Biggles really like eating chicken – it might even be their favorite food – but they were very subdued as they came face-to-face with the raw ingredient for all those comestible good times.

After being their staple treat on beach runs for the last six years, the beaglets probably think that all chicken comes pre-cooked, wrapped in foil and buried deep in one of my pockets. Those weird noisy things with sharp beaks? Whatever they were, they weren’t chickens.

The Walkhighlands guide gives the Knock Hill walk a “bog factor” of four out of five. This time around, after days of heavy rain, six out of five would have been closer to the truth. Biggles coped surprisingly well with all the marsh and mud, somehow always finding ground that would support his weight; Beanie – who I normally credit with more smarts – just ploughed straight through it all, going thigh-deep more than once.

Whatever the weather, the views from Knock Hill are always worth seeing. This time around it was the sunny spotlight on the island of Great Cumbrae that really delivered.

After capturing that light show I was keen to stick around on the summit for a while, but with high winds, rain on its way and a desperate shortage of bone-shaped biscuits, Beanie and Biggles didn’t share my enthusiasm. We had a vote on staying but as often happens I lost by eight paws to none.

The last biccie meets Biggles’ chewing gear, along with my thumb

The news that there are no more snacks is not well received by The Beanster

OK, OK, I get it! We’re going!

By the time we got back to the van we’d been thoroughly drenched by rain; on a more positive note I couldn’t see a single naughty Beagle hair on my trousers thanks to all the mud.

Even by lowly human standards my nose is a poor performer; it can detect quite strong smells – you know, the kind of thing that wafts your way when you’re sat next to a sleepy Beagle – but more subtle things escape it. In spite of this dysfunction, I know for a fact that ground-frost dramatically heightens the nasal allure of discarded food. I gained this knowledge the hard way – by dragging Beanie & Biggles away from things over and over again – and trust me, the dragging has been particularly hard over the last couple of weeks.

Beanie is always the peskiest offender in this respect. In mild weather she can walk on lead reasonably well until she encounters something edible, at which point she becomes a crazed scavenger, lunging at anything she sees on the pavement. During the recent cold snap however she’s been in scavenger mode on every walk, right from the first slippery step to the last. The worst example of this came when I foolishly chose to take our party along the main road out of our village.

The route takes us by many Beagle points of interest such as bins, front gardens, lamp poles and so on, and the resulting stoppages have led us to rename this stretch of road “Muck-about Street”. However on one particularly cold morning the pesk level was dialled right up to eleven, thanks to a discarded takeaway meal. I never managed to identify exactly what the meal had contained, but the packaging suggested that it was Chinese in origin; regardless, Beanie wanted it really, really badly. My first thought was to dodge round it by walking on the road, but a constant stream of cars made this impossible. If I’d been smart, I’d have simply held my ground until a break in the cars opened up, but as it was I decided to pin Beanie & Biggles to my side and frog-march them past as quickly as I could. Unsurprisingly I wasn’t fast enough and Beanie managed to get a solid grip on the bag of frozen goodies. Past experience has taught me the futility of trying to manually extract a takeway bag from her jaws; the bag tears open, spilling its contents all over the path, and suddenly there’s not one but two Beagles with their mouths stuffed full of forbidden items. Instead I went for speed approach: break into a sprint, dragging Beanie & Biggles behind me in the hope that either the bag or its contents would eventually fall out of reach.

Beanie knew what I was doing; she hung back as best she could, digging her paws into the pavement and clinging on desperately to the bag. Unfortunately for her, Biggles got into the spirit of things (he always loves a sprint) and shot past me on his lead to provide an extra burst of acceleration. This dragged The Beanster into motion and I was certain she’d have to ditch the bag any second; it was just too big for her to carry out in front and still keep up. However, she quickly found a solution to the problem: keeping her jaws tightly anchored on the top of the bag, she rested her front paws on its lower half. It was almost like her front end was surfing on top of the takeaway, with her little rear legs working extra hard to keep up as she was dragged along. She kept going like this for several yards before friction finally destroyed the bag. I saw the panic in her eyes as the contents spilled out and fell behind us, leaving her clutching nothing but shredded polythene. Victory was mine, but Beanie shot me her best Clint-Eastwood-style mean look and suddenly I didn’t feel like celebrating. She went into Greta-Garbo mode for the rest of the morning, only emerging from her custom-made bed to slurp from my unguarded coffee cup.

Beanie in Garbo mode. Those WOOFs on her bed are back to front; they should actually read “FOOW” – an acronym for “F-Off Outside World”