Week 29: Woof Bark

"Are you the guy that has given me £200 deposit for our male Cocker Spaniel puppy?”

My heart sinks. Don‘t tell me we are about to be blown-out again, especially after BT (Boy Teenager) and I had braved the ravages of darkest Swanley to go see the little fella only five days earlier.

“Yes. Yes that’s me. What’s up?”

”Well, me Nan has to go into hospital tomorrow and I am going to take her, so you won’t be able to collect the puppy then. Could you collect him today instead?”

Shhhhiiiiittttttt! Today? My brain goes into over-drive; bloody hell we aren’t ready! We haven’t got everything that we need! [we have]. The garden isn’t secure! [it is]. The Sitting Room, which will be the pup’s safe place, hasn’t got as gate across the door! [it has], and there are things the pup can still get at, like nests of electric cables and Gin’s favourite, recently re-upholstered rocking chair [wait up! I haven’t sorted that stuff yet].

”Yes that’s fine Sharon. Shall we collect him at 4pm?”

And this, dear friends, is how it came to be that I was frantically making cable barriers for the Sitting Room out of scrap wood at 9.45am. I have Pops to thank for the habit of holding on to bits of old wood “just in case they might be useful”. Mind you, his habit resulted in so much “useful wood” being stored in their loft, the house had to be under-pinned to bear the weight.

It’s been a week of mad pup arrival preparations. We’ve bought so much clobber Amazon has had to buy new picking robots for its Pets section, I’ve scoured every puppy training site that I could find and I’ve driven around half of London collecting Useful Dog Items from friends (a special thanks to Angela & Howard and Running Around John and his wife, Running Around Al (because she also does Running Around) for the crates).

The biggest job though was to make the garden secure to keep the pup in and the foxes out. Easy! A large hole in one wire fence needs to be mended, the top of the garden (where the big pile of ex-vegetation is; the one that we euphemistically refer to as “the compost heap”) has to be blocked off, and the side gate (the new one, installed in an earlier episode) needs a temporary block to stop squirrel-sized creatures wriggling out underneath. Shouldn’t take more than a day for a man of my lack of practicality.

I’d already settled on making temporary barriers with chicken-wire frames, figuring that once the pup is full-grown he will be too big to get through most of the holes we were worried about. All set, the wire arrived from Amazon, and five, 3.6 meter lengths of wood were ordered from Lawsons the wood merchant, 10 minutes walk down the road. BT assured me that he would help to carry it back, and collection was scheduled for Wednesday (technically the one in last week’s blog).

Wednesday came. BT had “a sore foot” (which actually amounted to a severe case of potential embarrassment at being seen carrying a load of wood up the hill with his Dad) and ducked out of helping. After Words Were Exchanged and I had determined that 3.6m long bits of wood wouldn‘t fit in either car, delivery was arranged. Skip forward to the current week; the wood arrived on Tuesday afternoon, leaving Wednesday as the day that it all Had To Be Done. No pressure then.

At this point I need to mention our lovely neighbour’s garden. Let’s call our neighbours Sally and Dave, which are, after all, their names. Sally and Dave are wonderfully practical people, and very, very good gardeners. Put it this way, the National Trust sends its new gardening staff to Sally & Dave’s house to see how a garden should look. It so happens that they are re-modelling their garden at exactly the same time that I am inserting a temporary, chicken-wire barrier into the fence between our houses. Pre-re-modelling, this wouldn’t have been an issue because there were Lots of Bushes. Now? My Heath Robinson-esque patch job is there for all to see. It looks crap, but the ivy will cover it fairly soon (I hope).

Anyway, good news! After nine hours of hitting my thumb with a hammer, no help from BT (because “I will be on duty when Milo arrives”. Milo is the name he has picked for the hound), and a reasonable amount of swearing, it’s done. And bugger me, it all works! Well it keeps Milo in, whilst the cat, having been temporarily confused before remembering that he can jumpy fences and climb trees, can get out. And the foxes? Proved that they can get around mere chicken wire constraints by leaving large deposits in the centre of the Bare Earth the we like to pretend is a lawn.

And so Milo arrived a day early, much to BT’s delight. GT (Girl Teenager), who is very nervous of dogs, was less delighted. “I won’t like him will I?” she texted me whilst BT and I were collecting him. No GT, you won’t like him. You will instantly adore him because he is a proper heart melter, and has such a gentle nature (currently). Gin (so called because her parents gave her the middle names of Bombay and Sapphire) was also a bit circumspect, but after 3 days, wouldn’t be without him.

And the cat? He has surprised us. The surprise is that the thug in him seems to be on the wane. He is the equivalent of a human age of late 60s, and I guess even your average member of the English Defence League moderates to just being a thoroughly unpleasant, nasty piece of work by that age. After a bit of hissing, the cat has been getting nearer to the new and desperate to make friends creature in the house. Unfortunately for him, the new fella has gained a mountain of confidence and coordination in the three days that he has been with us and has started to try to chase the cat. This is something that Must Not Be, resulting in several Benny Hill like scenes with the cat running up the garden, the dog in hot pursuit, followed by a distressed GT (Nothing Shalt Touch The Cat), a distressed BT (The Dog And Cat Must Learn To Live Together Peacefully) and an out-of-breath Father (Cycling Is Better Than Running).

It is fair to say that our lives have been completely turned on our heads. Having a pup in the house is like having a baby with no nappy. One that can scoot about really quite quickly. Teaching Milo his name (starting to get it), not to poo on the blanket in his bigger crate (starting to get it), and to wee on puppy pads by the back door, transitioning to outside the back door (starting to get it) is really time consuming. BT has shown a side of himself that we haven’t really seen before whereby he is taking the daily schedule and training methods Very Seriously. Woe-be-tide us if we don‘t do it in the right way at the right time. Gin and I like this (not the being told off bit, but the sense of responsibility), and whilst we have a long way to go to get the hound to the point of being managed and manageable, the early signs are that Milo will be a positive influence on the whole family. Except perhaps the cat.

I wonder whether we will be saying the same things at the end of week 30?

Love & elbow-grease,

Mr H

x

PS You may have spotted that there are no tales of daring-do cleaning with Bruce and Jurgen, nor indeed any of cooking. That's because little to none have been happening. Instead, the Caring bit is now full-time, but instead of it being devoted to BT, it's almost exclusively for Milo.