Why is it that so often when Monkey’s having a crisis, the humies around him burst out laughing? To be fair his most recent brush with Monkeycide did have me concerned for a few seconds, until I worked out what was actually going on.

We’d just started our walk, and I noticed that Monkey was really lagging behind, holding himself strangely and not moving normally. It looked like maybe he was in pain, and the way he was hunching up had me thinking that his back was hurting him; there are certainly plenty of Beagles with back problems. I think I said out loud “Oh please no” and then suddenly he sat on the ground in a very lazy puppy sit, as though he was about to scoot, but he didn’t scoot – he just sat there. I bent down to check him out, and then I realised the true cause of his distress. In our part of the world we get a particularly pesky species insect during summer; they don’t bite, but they harass you continually, buzzing away as they circle your head and repeatedly dive-bomb your ears, your nostrils, your eyes, try to get into your mouth and land on you. Once you’ve got a group of these annoying little buggers interested in you, they’ll stick with you for miles and often the only way to get any peace is to kill ’em. The good news is they only seem to be a problem for around six weeks and usually they’re done by mid-July, but this year they’re running late.

As soon as I got close to The Monkster I saw and heard a few of them buzzing round him, but they weren’t interested in his head; instead they were harassing his bum hole. I couldn’t help but laugh, which Monkey didn’t appreciate at all. He gave me a particularly pathetic, hurt look and I could almost hear him say “Oh thanks Dad. Yeah, thanks a lot for laughing at me in the midst of my very serious predicament!”. I took pity on him and tried to swat the flies away as best I could, then Daisy came to help out by trying to catch them. Unlike Beanie before her, Daisy’s actually pretty well tuned for hunting things and I think she nabbed one of them. Regardless, our joint efforts distracted the flies enough to continue on our journey, but of course they kept coming back to do flybys of Monkey’s sensitive exhaust port.

“I know Monkey, I hate them too, but if they stay with us all the way back home I’ll hit the little buggers with spray and we’ll have our revenge!” I said to comfort him, and it did seem to help; he looked back at me gratefully and was decidedly more stoic for the rest of the walk. Those flies did indeed follow us all the way round and right back into our garden, but they’d split by the time I came out of the kitchen armed with fast knockdown spray. Or, just possibly.. Daisy got the lot of ’em!

Yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got flies in my tummy :)

Speaking of Daisy, she’s responsible for the second “howler” of this post, in fact she is the howler. Daisy’s really found her voice this year and she’s not afraid to use it; she’s become almost as vocal as Biggles, always alerting the world to latest infringement  of Beagle Law committed by the neighbors, by delivery guys, and by sheep, cows and birds. Let’s face it pretty much anything can get the howl machine going. In the following video, the very first snippet is on Loudoun hill, and in the very top-left corner you can just see the trigger for the noise pollution: another walker was by the summit trig point and had decided, somewhat oddly, to lay on his back and waggle his feet in the air. After few rounds of verbal abuse he stopped, but of course Daisy didn’t and Monkey kept supporting her even though he clearly had no clue what all the fuss was about!

We’ve actually had a summer! It seems like it’s pretty much over now, but we’ve had one, and Team Beagle has made the most of it. Each immature crab apple that’s fallen from the tree has been grabbed, thrown back into the air and rolled on multiple times! No fresh tea towel has stayed long in our kitchen drawer before being nicked and paraded round the garden!

Over the last few weeks Daisy has become my bathroom buddy, always following me into the little room. I wish I could say she’s doing that because she loves me, but the truth is it’s all about my pants, or more specifically the pockets in my pants. The moment I drop my trousers for my daily constitutional, a snout is pushed into the right hand pocket where I usually keep a handful of biccies. It’s very cute, but it doesn’t help me accomplish the task I went in there to perform; sometimes a degree of concentration is required to get the job done – so to speak – and wiggly little Beagle girls are not at all conducive to this.

As for Monkey, well he’s become much better at nicking things from the kitchen. Just this morning he scored a sizeable chunk of butter – complete with it’s wrapper – and every missing tea towel has been his work. He nicks ’em from the kitchen, then Daisy nicks ’em from him and does a high speed tour of the garden. For some reason the tea towels seem to happen most when I’m working on the garden. It’s as though an unspoken conversation goes on between us:

Me: OK pups I’m just going out and mow the rear lawn now.
Monkey: Right Dad, just give me a second and I’ll get the tea towel!

To be honest I don’t think Monkey really understands the conventional uses of tea towels; I mean obviously they’re needed if you’re mowing the lawn, but also he brought one out when I was painting the deck railings with preservative, which was just plain silly. I tried to explain that to him but the grin on his face replied “I can’t help it Dad! I’m a Monkey Dad!”.

More summer moments:

On hotter days tasty frozen ice cubes have been greatly appreciated – even by Monkey, once he got over suspicion that they were some form of Monkeycide!

It’s alive! That tea towel is alive! But Daisy can fix that…

More crab apple fun

I think you’re supposed to catch it Daisy, not wear it..

Beware! Low flying Monkey!

This humping thing is more complicated than it looks. First you’ve got to get the right end, then you’ve got to find some way to climb up..

She’s doing it again Dad!

Chillin’ and letting it all hang out..

Snoozes in the shade..

Daisy keeps a lookout while Monkey attempts to use his bed-making skills on the chair.

Once settled in the chair, one must keep a suspicious eye out for falling leaves (and tiny crab apples)

Too knackered to do anything! Maybe this whole summer thing is overrated..

And finally, a quick blast of summer flowers..

It’s July – a month that in our part of the world usually means unrelenting heavy rain – but incredibly we’re enjoying something that actually qualifies as a “summer” : it’s warm but not crazy hot, it’s sunny and its dry. However, between the short but unpleasant heatwave I wrote about in my last post and this current blissful spell, we did have a short monsoon season. During the rain Daisy suffered her way through the worst walk in the entire history of Beagles. It was so bad it’s a wonder she survived, and we’re still dealing with the fallout from it.

There’s no gentle way to talk around what happened, so I’ll just come straight out with it: I put a raincoat on Daisy. It was one of a pair of quality raincoats that had served Beanie and Biggles very well, so I didn’t expect the wearing of it to be so traumatic for Daisy, but it was.

There were two major problems with it. Firstly it was hopelessly out of fashion, and apparently Daisy really cares about being in fashion. The second – more practical problem – was with the elastic leg straps. Since Daisy is such a short-arse, the straps were loose. I decided initially not to put her legs through them, but they kept tapping her rear legs as she walked, so then I tried fitting them properly. This was much worse! In no time at all Daisy managed to tangle her legs in the straps; at one point she even had both her legs through the same strap and was staggering around like some strange bondage Beagle. I shortened and tightened the straps by knotting them which prevented any further leg tangling calamities, but the damage was already done: this was unashamed Daisycide, and it was far worse than Monkeycide. Daisy was dry but livid when she got home; later that day she took a leaf out of the BPM (Beanie Protest Manual) and peed both our bed and her own. If Monkey’s crate hadn’t been closed, she’d probably have peed his bed too.

I changed our bed and Daisy’s, loaded the washing machine, and I decided it would be prudent to withdraw free Beagle access to our bedroom for a day or two. As I’ve noted before Monkey can open any door with a lever handle, so merely closing the door was not going to be enough. I hunted down one of the wooden handle locks I’d made some time ago, stuck my head in the bedroom to check that it was free of Beagles, closed it and popped the lock on, then sat down for a web surf with a well-earned coffee.

A couple of minutes later I heard energetic rummaging noises and assumed that it was Monkey in the toilet, raiding our toilet roll stash as he is wont to do. I really couldn’t be arsed going to chase him out of the toilet, so I just called out a loud generic “Oi!”. The rummaging noises stopped for a moment, but only for a moment, and when they resumed they were accompanied by a muffled yet jubilant “woof!!!”. Muffled woof’s are always a sign of the kind of Beagle activity that requires intervention – especially if they’re jubilant – so I put down my coffee and went to check the toilet. It was empty. There was only one other place the noises could be coming from: the bedroom. Apparently my spot check for Beagles had not been sufficiently thorough, and I’d actually locked Monkey in the bedroom. I took the lock off the handle, opened the door and saw Monkey on the bed with a classic “I wasn’t doing nothing Dad, honest!” look on his face.

Clearly he had been doing something, probably a few somethings. The bed clothes were messed up and pillows had been thrown about a bit, but there was nothing that would take more than a second to fix, and nothing that would have merited the muffled woof. It was at this point that I that I saw Bonzo II, a big doggy-shaped hot water bottle cover that Susan had made for Poppy when she was a little pup.

Bonzo hasn’t seen use in some time, and generally sleeps on top of the crates as a decoration. He wasn’t on top of the crates now though; he was on the floor, and though his features are sewn on I would have to say his expression looked a bit shocked. He still had all his paws, his tail, and even his ears, but on closer inspection I noticed a brown stain on Bonzo’s bottom, right at the hot water bottle entry point. Obviously I’ll never know quite how Bonzo came by that stain, but I do know that he joined the queue for the washing machine. And the free bedroom access ban is still in effect, for both of ’em.