The world’s loudest doorbell and most insistent morning alarm – otherwise known as Daisy – has just had her second birthday.

She didn’t use to be so vocal; when she first came to us she was as timid and quiet as a mouse. We still see glimpses of that timidity: on a recent beach run Daisy’s extender lead slipped out of my rain-soaked grip and slid down Monkey’s lead before colliding unceremoniously with her bum. She yelped, tucked her tail and cowered like a still-traumatised rescue dog from an abusive home. I gave her a cuddle and a kiss to reassure her, and I half expected Monkey to come running to her aid but he didn’t; he was otherwise occupied with a challenging and artistic poo, carefully depositing his logs on a particularly high but narrow clump of grass.  Perhaps Monkey has simply attended too many Daisy “emergencies” that turned out to be nothing of the sort. Regardless, once she’d had a sufficiently soppy moment with me she returned to her normal state: that of a cocky little street urchin with a princess complex.

In recent months she’s discovered her inner Biggles. Like our much-missed boy she loves to keep watch by the window and pass ear-splitting judgement on anyone and anything that dares to enter her field of view. Unlike Biggles, she’s such a short-arse that she has to mount the back of the sofa to see out of the window properly. Monkey of course is not the least bit height-challenged and can often be found alongside Daisy on the lower tier of the sofa, resting on his elbows for comfort when a gobbing-off lasts longer than expected.

Sometimes I feel you don’t fully appreciate the seriousness of the situation outside Dad!

Daisy has an inner Beanie too; she’s got a quartz-accurate internal timer for mealtimes, but since breakfast is so very important she’s taken to sounding the alarm a few minutes early each morning. It starts with an understated dripping-tap whimper, but can quickly escalate to a warbling scream if no humie gets out of bed to begin the serving process.

As soon as the bowls go down and the crates are opened she bursts out and sprints for all she’s worth, but Susan maintains that Daisy is still a long way from reaching Poppy’s legendary breakfast speed. Like a top-end sports car Poppy had the Beagle equivalent of launch control, and would drift her way through the corners to come to a perfectly executed skid-stop right over her bowl.

Speaking of speed-eating, there was plenty of that going on when Susan finished adding the mashed potato “icing” to a certain little miss’s birthday cake. Admittedly our version of the cake didn’t look quite like the photo on the Battersea website where I found the recipe, but Daisy and Monkey got very excited about it all the same.

The following shot is horribly out of focus, but it still captures the speed and efficacy of Daisy’s snatch-and-grab cake raids. Just as I was preparing to serve up her second slice – complete with meaty stick instead of a candle – she pogo-sticked to my shoulder-height and grabbed the stick along with a mouthful of mashed potato. Truly she now has the full Beagle skillset.

In the space of a couple of minutes the whole cake was in Beagle tummies and the plate it was resting on was scrupulously clean. You might think that a whole cake in one serving was a bit over-indulgent, but trust me they’d earned it on their walk up Loudoun hill the previous day!

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Their last visit to Loudoun had been some time ago so all the sniffs were new, intense and exciting. Also exciting was the guy who was chilling out by the summit trig point; he was wearing a bright orange Beanie hat and every time he sat up, that little orange blob popped into view and drove Monkey and Daisy wild. There was much woofing from both of them, but predictably it was Daisy who contributed the most noise pollution. This was Daisy for the first 20 minutes after we got back home:

An announcement from the palace: HRH Princess Daisy is properly knackered!

Normal operations were of course restored the next day, once the cake had been digested and the sun had come out!

There’s never a bad time to have a Beagle birthday, but early March is I think particularly good; the days are getting longer, the sun’s putting in more appearances, and all the early bulbs are starting to show. What better time to celebrate the bright little girl who came into our lives when we needed her and made all of us – Monkey especially – happy again.

Beanie & Biggles had no less four grand space-related adventures: they sent their names to Mars aboard the Curiosity Rover, went on a round trip to an asterioid called Bennu, staked a claim on a small bit of Mars real estate, and had a sniff around Europa. Now it’s Monkey & Daisy’s turn, because I’ve just got them return tickets for the Artemis II mission to the moon!

You can book your Beagle moon adventure too but don’t hang about, because Artemis II is due to launch early to mid March. Here’s the sign up link, and it costs nothing more than 20 secs of your time:

https://www3.nasa.gov/send-your-name-with-artemis/

To be honest I think Monkey may be a bit more enthusiastic about this trip than Daisy; she’s never keen on wearing her harness, and the rumor is that space harnesses are even more constraining than the one she uses on the beach.

The conversations I have on dog walks often start with: “Beagles aren’t they? You rarely see them nowadays.” I tend to disagree; I regularly see other Beagles when we’re out on our walks, in fact there are two other Beagles that I know of in our small village, and we’ve just discovered that one of them – a cute little boy –  shares one of Daisy’s behavioral foibles.

Historically whenever we’ve met him we’ve been going in opposite directions. We stop, sniff and tangle leads, swap stories of naughtiness, then continue on our way with minimal difficulty. During a recent walk however we found ourselves behind him and travelling in the same direction. With about a hundred yards between us, the boy’s owner stopped to chat with another dog walker. Initially the boy was distracted by sniffs and wasn’t aware of us, but in their desperation to meet him again Monkey and Daisy began crying and whining. The boy heard them and locked attention on us; in response Monkey and Daisy began pulling like trains and in no time at all we’d caught up to him.

The usual greeting rituals took place and in due course the boy’s owner and I decided that we’d each better crack on with the business of getting home. We tried setting off at the same time, but this wasn’t really viable as the lane was quite narrow and there was still sniffing and lead tangling going on, so I held back to let the boy and his owner get ahead.

This didn’t work either because the little boy wasn’t at all keen to leave Monkey and Daisy behind. He applied his emergency brakes, bracing all his paws to resist the pull of the lead, and after a moment of struggling his owner said:  “Maybe you should take the lead!”

“OK, but I think that could be problematic too!” I replied, knowing that Daisy was about to demonstrate her own version of emergency braking. I only got three steps ahead before I felt the lead go tight and heard the dragging of Daisy’s harness on the ground. I looked round and yep, she’d gone over onto her side – a technique I call “throwing out the anchor”.

“Come on Daisy! Up! Up!”

Nope.

“Come on, let’s get moving little girl!”

Wag-wag-wag, but still nope.

The only way to make progress was to take point alternately, swapping each time a Beagle anchor was deployed. I’d get a few steps ahead before Daisy went over, by which time the boy – eager to catch up to her – was willing to charge forward until he’d just overtaken us, at which point he’d stamp on his own brakes. Daisy was now at the rear, so I could get her up on her feet and take a few more steps before she went over again. Rinse and repeat.

As it turned out the boy’s home was only 150 yards away, but it was a really slow, arduous 150 yards. Even when he disappeared inside I had a struggle convincing Daisy to keep going. She’s approaching her second birthday and I thought I’d mostly got her over this little habit, but I was wrong.

We’ve seen a return of one of Monkey’s old habits too: bed shredding. I think it started with an overly vigorous bed-making session that tore a hole, and was then followed by a “Mastermind” moment, by which I mean the old game show that has the catchphrase “I’ve started so I’ll finish.”

Fortunately it was a cheap bed and I’d bought a spare to make washday easier, so I just cleaned up and inserted the replacement. Two days later he committed bedicide again so I had no alternative but to get a new one. Though officially the large size, it arrived in a container not much bigger than a shoebox. Apparently that’s how it’s done with online orders now: super-vacuum compress the bed, leaving the buyer to free it from the packing (hopefully without puncturing it) then fluff it up repeatedly over the next 72 hours as it slowly regains its original form. When he saw it Monkey really wanted to help with the fluffing-up process, but I thought it better to do it all myself, given that it was his bedmaking skills that forced the purchase in the first place :)