A long time ago – way before we had Beagles in our lives – Susan had a cat, and one day that cat left a little present in the pocket of my favorite jacket. When I got home from work I put that jacket on and went to one of our local video/DVD rental shops (yes, it was that long ago). While browsing the action and adventure section I dug around in my pockets looking for a tissue to blow my nose, and instead my fingers latched onto something else. It was cold, firm yet slightly moist, almost clay-like, and roughly cylindrical, a little over an inch long.

“What on earth could that be?” I thought, and pulled it out of my pocket for a look.  The very last thing I expected to see in my hand was a cat poo, but there it was. I’m ashamed to say I left it right there in the shop, wrapped up in a paper hanky by a row of Chuck Norris films. The feel of that little cat jobby between my fingers is etched in memory, and I would instantly recognize it if anything like that were ever to happen again.

Just over a week ago something like that did happen again. It was early in the morning, intensely cold, some little while after I’d let Beanie and Biggles out of their crates and into our beds for a snuggle. The call of nature forced me out of bed, so I staggered to the toilet in the near-dark, then staggered back to bed, slowly feeling my way back under the covers so as to avoid putting any weight on stray tails, paws or ears. My fingers closed around something that shouldn’t have been there, and suddenly I felt like I was right back in that video shop. I put the light on to confirm my suspicions and yep, there it was, a poo. In the bed. Our bed. A poo. Fortunately it was small, solid and dry so there was no obvious contamination of the sheets. I was so tired I just wanted to get back to sleep, so I wrapped the little deposit in toilet paper, flushed it, my washed my hands and went back to bed, briefly noting to Susan that we really should change the bed before the next night.

During the day I kept puzzling over the origin of that poo. Susan and Beanie were in the clear because they’d been on the other side of the bed. That left Biggles as the obvious suspect, and I figured it was probable that the poo had been a “klingon” or “brown dangle-berry” that had detached itself once he got into bed. There was however another, more worrying explanation; inspired by pro-vegetarian film “The Game Changers” we’d had a run of vegetable-heavy, meat-free meals and I’d been farting like a trooper for days. Was it possible that I’d released some gas build up during the night and there’d been a little bit of follow through? I couldn’t completely discount it.

The poodunnit mystery went unsolved until a few days later when the same thing happened again, but this time I caught The Bigglet trying to bury this second deposit in the bed by repeatedly pushing the sheets with his nose. I challenged him verbally with “Biggles, did you do that?” and he looked at me with his “it’s a fair cop, Dad” expression. Case closed, and in fairness the two poo incidents had happened after nights when fireworks had been going off, so there were extenuating circumstances.

Speaking of fireworks, Beanie generally coped with them better than last year, but on the night of November 5th we did end up making her a “bunker” in the bath tub. Yep, for some reason Beanie felt safer with four white fiberglass walls around her. Maybe she’d remembered the bomb-in-the-bathroom scene in one of the Lethal Weapon movies; if a bathtub was strong enough to save Mel Gibson and Danny Glover from the big booms, surely it could save a little Beagle girl too? Regardless, we ended up moving one of the office dog beds into the tub and lifting our shaking, Thundershirt-clad Beanster onto it. Every few minutes one of us would pop into the bathroom to check on her; about an hour after the fireworks seemed to have stopped I got a brief tail flick when asked her if she was OK. A further hour after that I got a full wag, and shortly thereafter Beanie felt able to leave her safe place. Happily she got through most of the other nights with only an odd glance at the ceiling. There did seem to be fewer fireworks overall this year; maybe after recent political events fewer people felt like celebrating an unsuccessful attempt to get rid of parliament :)

I’ll finish this post with a few shots from a fine local walk around Stewarton. It went through a very nice stretch of woodland that still had some Autumn color. We’ve been living in Ayrshire for a decade now and this walk is only a short drive away, yet I didn’t even know it existed until by chance it popped up in a Google search. I guess that’s often the way with things that are virtually on your doorstep.

Things like colds aren’t supposed to cross the species boundary, but after this last couple of weeks I’m having my doubts about that. Biggles came down with the closest thing to human cold symptoms I’ve ever seen in a dog; he had frequent explosive sneezes and sniffles and seemed a bit low on energy, wanting to be wrapped up in blankies and snuggled a bit more than usual. Just as his symptoms were clearing up, Beanie started with the same thing, and a day after that it was my turn. While I was stocking up on tissues and Lemsip Susan started having a few explosive sneezes too, almost bringing the hit-count to four.  Fortunately I got her one of those cold defence sprays from the chemist and it seems to have helped her dodge the full-blown version of this particular lurgy.  Bottom line: if this wasn’t cross-species sniffles then we’ve experienced a rather improbable series of coincidences!

The bout of nasal explosions didn’t stop Biggles from implementing another of his cunning plans, this time involving the filled cow hooves I’ve been getting for them recently. The normal pattern with these things is that both pups are all over them while there’s still tasty filling to be extracted, but once that’s gone, I may as well just throw the hooves in the bin. This time however Biggles showed a lot of interest in one of the empty hooves, taking it down into his corridor for an intensive gnawing session each evening. The sound of Beagle teeth getting to work on something in the corridor is normally a cause for alarm, but over the course of a week I came to accept that it was just Biggles having a bit of hoof time, and eventually I stopped checking on him. It was of course at this point that my boy seized the opportunity to rip the squeaker out of his new teddy and remove the toe sections from a couple of pairs of socks.

We often joke that Biggles only has one working brain cell

But when it comes to tactics, he’s a master