In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams declared that the towel is “the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have“. That may be true for humans, but Beagles need something a little  more compact than a regular towel, like.. a tea towel!

This particular tea towel was obtained through another of Biggles’ new abilities: climbing on to the kitchen table. Until recently Biggles could only jump to grab things off the table and the kitchen work surfaces, and consequently items sitting too far from the edge were out of his reach. Now all that has changed; he’s suddenly realized that he can use chairs and other furniture as a step to help reach his goal. It’s a revelation for the Biggly boy – a bit like the Daleks suddenly being able to go up stairs.

Unfortunately any big plans he had for the tea towel were scuppered by big sis Beanie, who alerted me with her signature “Dad he’s got something again!” bark. To be honest that bark of hers probably means something quite different, like “Hey I want that! Gimme!” but regardless, when I hear it I know that the Bigglet has got something.

In this case I arrived a little too late to save the tea towel from a severe shredding, so I let him taunt Beanie with it for a bit. After all there’s no point getting a thing if you can’t wave it in front of your sister’s face!

If you’re the sort of person who thinks dogs should know their place, you’re going to be shaking your head in disbelief by the time you’ve read this post. In fact why not save time and get the head shaking over right now. Go on, give it a good old shake. Done? OK, here we go…

After spending most of yesterday morning & afternoon in the garden with us, we put Beanie & Biggles to bed in their crates for a couple of hours  to let us get on with a few jobs free of Beagle assistance. It never occurred to us that Biggles might be close to needing a pee. It certainly occurred to him, and our poor little boy ended up wetting the bed in his crate. There wasn’t time to get his bed washed and dried before proper doggy bed time, so he had to make do with an improvised bed. It obviously wasn’t as cosy as his real bed, and at around 2 am that night he started complaining about it. We felt a degree of culpability over the bed wetting incident, so Susan opened up his crate to let him into our bed. Of course when you let one of our Beagles out, you have to let the other one out too, so Beanie came to join us. I figured that might be a recipe for a poor night’s sleep, but even I wasn’t prepared for what was to come.

Beanie did her usual lie-across-the-bed routine, but Biggles was insufferable. Ordinarily he can sleep soundly just about anywhere, in any position, for hours at a time..

..but this night, he was the fidgetmeister. He snuggled up against me for a couple of minutes, then he got too hot and crawled out from under the covers. As soon as he was cool enough he hassled me again to get back under the covers. Then he got really hot and climbed out of the bed, dropping onto the floor in a heap. Two minutes later he felt the need to roll onto his side, which he did with all the grace and stealth of a 30lb sack of tatties. Flump! Then he rolled onto his other side. Flump! Shortly thereafter he wanted to get back onto the bed, but being Biggles he couldn’t just jump up there on his own, oh no, he had to paw my arm until I sat up to give him a clear path and told him “Go”. Back under the covers, he could once again cosy up to me. Until he got too hot again… And so it went on, and on, and all the time I’m contorting myself into weird positions to accommodate Beanie. Very good if you’ve got a dodgy back, I can assure you.

Around 5am the Biggly boy quit fidgeting and I thought I might finally catch a couple of hours’ uninterrupted sleep. Just as I was drifting off I heard a scratching noise. I checked the bed, and Biggles wasn’t in it. The scratching continued so I got up and walked towards it, to be greeted by a very animated Bigglet. He paced up and down between me and the door, clearly desperate for a pee, and looked at me with an expression that said “Dad, you know what’s going to happen if you don’t get me to the garden, FAST!” So I threw on my clothes and took him out for his leak. I *think* I got a bit of sleep somewhere between 6-7am, but when I got up I felt like.. well, kind of like Beanie looks in this picture:

Refreshed, alert and ready for the day ahead. NOT.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Beagles! Who’d ‘ave ’em!

The clocks have gone forward on hour! We’re now officially in British Summer Time (BST) and just to prove that the weather has a sense of humor, temperatures are supposed to dip below freezing tonight and stay low for most of next week.

This is not exactly ideal conditions for germinating grass seed. It’s pretty obvious we’re not going to have a fully recovered lawn for at least a month, if not two, and since we’re not prepared to deprive Beanie & Biggles of their play area for any longer, we’ve decided to “sacrifice” half of the garden. A fence will keep the lower half safe from Beagle interference for however long it takes the grass to regrow, and in the meantime our two hooligans can let off steam in the upper half, saving their sanity and ours. Later in the year we can either swap sides or fence off small areas for localized repairs.

I have to say that Beanie and Biggles seem quite pleased with our decision..

Even though they were given more or less free rein within their enclosure, they didn’t disturb the bare soil and seed much at all. I’ve noticed that our Beagles seem to have a talent for homing in on the things we don’t want them to mess with; the flip side is that if we’re not bothered about something, there’s a fair chance they’ll leave it alone. When I saw Biggles getting very interested in a graveled corner by the fence, I tried to make this Beagle intuition work for me;  I figured that if I didn’t react, maybe he’d just give it a couple of sniffs and move on.

Apparently the Beagle “sixth sense” also enables them to suss out when you’re trying to use reverse logic.