We’ve often mused over what career Biggles might choose if he were human. Rocket scientist / brain surgeon would be unlikely, but he’d be a natural as model. As a fireman, his remarkable peeing ability would let him put out fires even when no water supply was available. Sadly though, I think there’s only one role that really suits him: bouncer. He’s certainly been practicing his repulsing skills this last week or so. Our gas boiler’s been on the blink, and each Scottish Gas engineer brave enough to try to fix it has had to get past our little tricolored doorman.

Sorry mate can’t let you in, yer far too casual

The first three engineers got the standard “not with those shoes” patter that’s used for the postie and milkman, but the final guy got the harshest reception ever. Biggles watched him from the lounge window, becoming more and more insensed as he approached the house. When the man came in there was a woofing of biblical proportions, then Biggles charged towards him, completely forgetting about the closed baby gate barring exit from the lounge. There was a loud thunk! followed by the sound of ringing metal as Beagle bonce met tubular steel. The lower part of the gate was unseated from the door frame by the force of the impact, but Biggles himself was undazed and continued to woof, whine and bay at the poor engineer. Even Beanie joined in on the act. What had the guy done to deserve this? Well as far as I could tell his main crime was growing a beard. If there’s one thing that can really wind up Bouncer Biggles, it’s a beard. Or someone with a bicycle helmet, or an umbrella, or the wrong color of jacket, or a flapping carrier bag, or.. well let’s face it, the list of things that can set Biggles off is extensive, but this time it was the beard.

When the engineer disappeared into the utility room to do battle with our boiler, Biggles felt the need to burn off his frustration in a “harring” session with Beanie. What’s harring you may ask? Well it’s a noisy squabbling/wrestling match that begins with two open mouths pressed together and the sound of helium-breathing pirates.

Haaarrr!!

Quite what the gas engineer thought was happening when he heard all the crashes, bangs and wailing coming from the lounge is anybody’s guess, but against the odds he restored our boiler to health and emerged triumphant from the utility room only to receive a further irate woofing. After he’d gone Biggles had seen him off, the two woofers had a hectic play session in the garden to round the day off.

Just when Beanie and Biggles had got used to their dad pointing a thing at them and making clicking noises now mum’s doing it too!

Until now a rare occurrence – a photo of the Beaglets with their dad

For a variety of reasons it’s started to make more and more sense for me to get into photography too.

• We enjoy combining hiking, hill walking, canicross and photography and making a holiday of it – it’ll be nice for me to get involved in the photography
• It gets tedious ‘Beagle sitting’ for hours on end while Paul takes “just one more!”
• We rarely get pictures of Paul with the pups.
• We’ve now got two cameras (Don’t ask me why! It sounded reasonable when Paul explained it to me.)
• We’ve spent a small fortune on photography equipment so I can’t afford another hobby!

I’ve always enjoyed creative hobbies and love the post processing side of photography, but until now I’ve never been inspired to use the camera. Today on our walk we swapped roles for the first time and Paul puppy minded while I wandered about snapping everything in sight. My first piccy isn’t up to Paul’s standard but I just wanted to get comfortable using the camera. I’ll be practicing hard over the next couple of weeks ready for our Skye trip. So watch this space!!

When a mini heatwave descended this week, indoor work was abandoned in favour of gardening. As always, Beanie and Biggles wanted to ‘help’ with everything.

We have a large back lawn so Beanie and Biggles like to help out by eating bits of cut grass that the lawnmower leaves behind. We’re used to finding bits of cut grass all over the house, but this time Biggles surpassed himself. I walked into the hall and saw something suspiciously ‘poo-shaped’ nestling by the skirting board. I called Paul in to investigate and after a bit of poking we included it was indeed a Biggle-poo. But made 100% of fresh, odorless green grass! We’re pretty sure that it must have gone through the ‘Biggle processing plant’ – how else would it get perfectly poo-shaped? All very mysterious!

Next up was digging the flower beds and planting some new clematis. Beanie and Biggles are very good at digging and they particularly like to dig where we’ve been digging. Needless to say, all of our flower beds end up looking like this:

…which kind of defeats the purpose!

When Paul and I had finished work for the day Beanie and Biggles were still going strong. A Beagle’s work is never done!!

Mad chases around the garden:

Sentry duty:

Fetching that pesky ball again, and again, and again:

And of course arguing loudly over a sock (the neighbours really appreciate this one!):

After all that hard work you can’t beat a nice cuppa:

…and a spot of sunbathing: