I studied Latin at school and as part of that I had the dubious pleasure of reading The Aeneid. It tells the story of Aeneas, an impeccably brave, heroic warrior in Troy, who, at the height of the action involving the Trojan Horse, sort of er.. ran away. He didn’t want to run away you understand, in fact there’s nothing he’d have liked more than to die screaming in a pool of his own blood and intestines after a short and disastrous tussle with Achilles, who was pretty much the ancient world’s version of Arnold Swarzenneger in the Commando movie.

Anyway, the whole getting horribly killed thing had to be put on hold because Aeneas had a greater responsibility to the future; specifically, a ghostly vision reliably informed him that he had to leg it out of Troy, stay alive and pave the way for the creation of Rome. Any time he had any thoughts of getting his intestines out and painting the floor red, another vision would conveniently remind him to keep on running.

As I see it, Aeneas was basically Monkey.

Like Aeneas, Monkey is by nature incredibly brave and heroic but his duty to the future demands that he temper his natural inclinations. For Aeneas, Rome was at stake; for Monkey, well it’s basically all about his balls. For the sake of all Beagle kind he must protect them, whatever the cost. When he’s out on a walk passing by a farm and an aggressive duck waddles across his path, he can’t recklessly wade in and protect his fellow pack members. No, the prudent and necessary thing to do – no matter much it goes against the grain – is to shelter behind his dad’s legs and protect those precious baubles. If the duck wants a fight, it can fight Biggles (he doesn’t have any baubles anyway).

I presume Monkey was also protecting his baubles the other night when Biggles grumped at him, and in an act of prudent bravery, he scarpered across the room with his tail tucked and leaped onto  the buffet. Apparently one sure way to protect one’s  unmentionables is to seek higher ground.

So, next time you think life your life is hard, just be grateful you don’t have to protect Monkey’s balls. Or found Rome.

Yep, it’s not easy being a hero.

Following a near disaster on the beach, Biggles has decided that he can no longer risk letting me offlead when we go for a run. It wasn’t an easy decision for him to make but it was necessary for two main reasons:

1. in recent months my voice has become so quiet that even Biggles can’t hear me when I’m calling for help, and
2. due to my advancing years, I’ve been exhibiting moments of confusion that make me likely to forget where Biggles is

Faced with these issues, any caring Beagle would have done the same for his pet humie. For completeness, it’s worth recording the events of the last beach run which brought all this to a head.

From Biggles’ point of view, it began much like any other beach outing. His assistance humie left him languishing in his travel crate for far too long, clearly unaware of the pressing need to get out and woof at other beach goers. Once the humie had de-crated Biggles, he chose to start running at the exact moment Biggles needed to drop his furry pants and relieve himself. The humie then had the temerity to complain about having to pick up his poop when everybody else – especially Monkey and Poppy – are always desperate to get hold of a genuine Biggles bottom sausage.

As the run got under way the two legged assistant demonstrated woeful ignorance over which tidal debris merited peeing on versus those that didn’t. He was also way too stingy with the hotdog pieces and even insisted on giving some of them to the other dogs in the pack, which was of course ridiculous. Anyway, after a short distance Biggles let the humie offlead and things proceeded fairly normally until, for some unknown reason, the silly humie failed to follow Biggles on an urgent sniffing mission. Worse than that, the humie even led the rest of the pack astray, wandering off who knows where and leaving Biggles all on his own.

Being such a resourceful Beagle, Biggles eventually managed to find another humie – two humies in fact. Both of these humies seemed quite nice and Biggles would happily have stayed with them were it not for the fact that they didn’t have any hotdog pieces. Given that the missing humie did (at last sighting) still have hotdog pieces, Biggles reasoned that it was worthwhile trying to get that humie back. The two surrogate humies seemed quite keen to help make that happen, and after a strange ritual involving those small beeping rectangular boxes that don’t taste nice, they managed to recall the errant humie to Biggles’ location. Hotdog pieces were consumed, and the day ended well.

From my point of view, this was right up there on the worry scale with the time Beanie went AWOL for over three hours on the top of a mountain. At first I couldn’t even believe that I’d lost him; he’d been in clear sight all the way as we approached the turning point on the run. The final 100 yards or so of the run is along a section of beach that has concrete re-enforcement to prevent erosion of the shoreline; there are hardly any places where an elderly and confused Beagle boy can get out of sight, so I took my eyes off Biggles for a moment, and when I stopped and looked back, he was gone.

Knowing that he had to be close-by and assuming (wrongly, as it turned out) that he couldn’t have got ahead of me, I put Beanie on lead and began retracing my steps with her and the pups, convinced that Biggles would pop up from behind a washed up log or patch of overgrown grass. After 5 minutes of going back and forth without finding him, I was getting worried. I decided to drag the pups up the embankment, thinking that a bit of height would reveal Biggles’ location. It didn’t, but I saw some golfers and asked them if they’d seen my errant Beagle, again without success.

I remained convinced that Biggles was nearby, but why hadn’t I seen him and why wasn’t he trying to find me? The answer that kept popping into my head was that he’d injured himself, or had experienced a stroke or heart attack, and was lying helpless in a ditch closeby but well hidden. It occurred to me more than once that this could be the end for Biggles – he could die alone on the beach with me no more than a hundred yards away but unable to find him in time. Getting desperate, I started searching deeper into the sand dunes and the adjoining golf course, still returning periodically to the beach in the hope that Biggles would reappear under his own steam.

I called Susan to let her know the situation, and in short order she packed some Beagle-hunting supplies and hitched a ride to the beach in a neighbour’s car. In the meantime, I continued my fruitless search. By chance I spotted an older guy walking along the way we’d come. I ran up to ask him if he’d seen Biggles, and of course the answer was no, but the guy assured me he’d keep an eye out. I thanked him, but didn’t expect anything to come of it – as far as I was concerned I’d just wasted a bit more time that could have been spent searching for my boy. Some 20 minutes later, that man proved me completely wrong. Not only had he found Biggles, but he’d also found a tourist with phone, and got him to call me using the details on Biggles’ collar.

It took me some time to work out where the two guys were; the tourist didn’t know the area and had trouble understanding my accent (not helped by the fact that intense windchill had numbed my entire face and left me speaking like John Hurt in The Elephant Man movie). In the end he sent me a gps map of his location, and I set off towards it, somewhat reluctantly at first because it was ahead of me rather than behind. Regardless, after a few minutes running I reached the tourist who pointed me in the direction of the older guy I’d met earlier. From this distance all I could see were a couple of dots, but as I drew closer I recognised the man and the cheerful little white Beagle trotting to heel next to him (the guy had improvised a lead for Biggles out of package strapping that often litters the beach). Biggles didn’t seem particularly relieved to see me; he’d been with this nice man who’d looked after him and that was fine, and now he was back with me, getting hotdog pieces popped into his mouth, which was also fine. I thanked the guy again and again, hooked Biggles back up to my own lead, and began the long jog back to the van. In due course we rendezvoused with Susan and the kind neighboured who’d joined the cavalry.

I’ve always been an advocate for quality of life over quantity, and that’s why I’ve given Beanie & Biggles offlead time on our beach runs for the last 13 years. It was a calculated risk, but now Biggles has lost most of his hearing and some of his marbles, that calculation has changed. I don’t know when Biggles will head across the rainbow bridge, but until that day, we’re always going to know exactly where he is (even if he doesn’t know himself).

Some days Her Royal Highness The Beanster has no trouble jumping onto the sofas in our living room, but there are also times when a sofa jump goes disastrously wrong, leaving her half on, half off, with her little back legs desperately trying to get purchase in the air. It’s a distinctly unregal position, and one that requires  a solution. Unfortunately Princess Beanie is very picky about the surfaces she’s prepared to walk on. We bought a small, sturdy metal step with folding legs, but Beanie just couldn’t bring herself to trust it, in fact she would go out of her way to avoid it which actually led her to have more embarrassing sofa mishaps. We started looking at folding ramps – the kind that are common on eBay and Amazon – and despite some misgivings about their rigidity I twice tried to buy one, but each time the purchase fell through (all too common in these days of high inflation, with sellers regularly refunding items when they realise they could be charging more). It turns out those failed purchases were fortunate, because eventually Susan found this – a padded step and ramp set for children.

Beanie immediately took to them both, but the step was the perfect height for the sofa. The first time she used it she looked right at me and wagged furiously, obviously happy to be able to get up any time under her own steam. It felt great to give her back a bit of independence and stop the indignity of getting beached on the furniture in her own home.

While the step restored 24/7 sofa access for Beanie, Poppy made a virtual no-go zone by de positing a spectacular barf by our rear kitchen door. When I heard her rhythmic stomach pump starting up I hurried her through the door in the hope that she’d do her technicolor yawn on the grass, but Poppy’s never been one to walk any distance when there’s chunks to be blown. Nope, she just opened her mouth and let rip right there on the deck. It was, at least, outside the house, and the sheer quantity was impressive for a such a small Beaglet. I washed most of it away with a a few jugs of water and a squirt of washing up liquid, and figured that was the end of it. How wrong I was. For the next four days only Beanie was prepared to walk straight through the barf zone; everyone else needed verbal encouragement and even a toe up the bum to get across it. It was as though each little bit of spew residue was a miniature Gandalf proclaiming “Thou shalt not pass!”. This quickly became a source of irritation; handling the endless rounds of pee requests on an evening is bad enough, but now each outgoing and return loo trip involved the vomit avoidance ritual. It was particularly galling that Poppy was so keen to avoid stepping on it given that she had been its creator. I washed the area again but it made no difference – only tine eventually robbed the Gandalf-vomit of its remarkable power.

A few more recent moments:

A visit to the old pier at Portencross. That big hole is not really something you want to encounter when you’re holding on to four pulling Beagles, but happily no-one got an unscheduled swimming session that day.

The geese at Dean Castle Park are approaching! Notice how not a single one of our fearless Beagles is prepared to look them in the eye.

You just can’t beat frosty sniffs

But there are clear signs that Spring is on its way

The youngsters assist in clearing up last year’s dead growth. Unfortunately they’d be just as keen to assist in clearing up this year’s fresh growth too.

Poppy celebrates the final departure of her unnatural barf