As I noted in the last post, we started the festivities a few days early to mark the gradual return to longer days. That didn’t mean that we’d run out of pressies by the 25th however.

Most of the pressies were replacements for toys that “reached end-of-life” during the year (or to put it more plainly, toys that were mercilessly destroyed by The Monkster). Knowing Monkey the way we do, we also included a small surplus to account for cases of infant mortality, like the squeaky cow that bought it within an hour of its unwrapping.

Both of our pups like toys they can throw around, but there’s a marked difference in how they play. Monkey is all about fun; he hurls his toy into the air, not having a clue where it’s going to land or who or what it might hit in the process.

By contrast, Daisy’s play is clearly a rehearsal for the day she catches the squirrel that visits our garden; any toy she gets is subjected to a brief but violent shaking action that’s no doubt intended to break bones and rip flesh. She means business!

For all that, it’s playful Monkey that actually kills toys, but he seems to do it from the perspective of a deranged scientist rather than a blood-drunk hunter. He considers it his duty to reveal the innermost secrets of a toy via a process of calm, deliberate and very thorough dissection. This only happens once the toy tossing stage has finished, so on this day we felt it prudent to remove the toys to a safe place before he could settle down and “follow the science”.

We’re now nearing the end of the year, a year that had us saying goodbye to three very loved little Beaglets. They’ve been on our minds a lot over the last few days, but the grins and snuggles we’ve had from Monkey & Daisy have helped make this Christmas a good one; I hope it’s been so for all our readers.

Finally, a festive humping and some more piccies.

This year we decided to start our Christmas celebrations on the shortest day (21st Dec here in the UK), as we’ve been really feeling the ever shorter grey days recently and it seemed right to mark the turning point. Inevitably this meant giving special posh nosh and treats to Team Beagle, and giving them early access to some of their pressies. This was very well received by the pups..

The pups got a crinkly fox and a squeaky cow. The fox got all the early attention..


..But then the cow got its moment in the spotlight.




I regret to inform you that while Mr Fox is still with us – albeit with horrific facial injuries and severly depleted white filling – the cow was retired from active service in less than an hour.

The posh nosh aspect disrupted our usual doggy meal preparations. We’ve got into the habit of preparing the next morning’s doggy breakfast at the same time as their teatime meal; it just makes things easier to get them fed before the next day’s first coffee has taken effect. However, with actual chicken going into bowls instead of kibble, we forgot to do this and I only noticed the omission once the pups had gone to bed. I’m very much aware that Beagle hearing is superior to my own, and that both Monkey and Daisy are very attuned to the sound of kibble being poured into a bowl, but I figured I could get away with some late night prep just this once if I took appropriate precautions. I carefully closed the bedroom door, turned up the volume on the second Matrix film which was playing in the lounge, then snook into the kitchen, closed that door, then proceeded into the utility room to do the actual dishing out and closed that door behind me too. So just to recap, I had three closed doors and a noisy action-filled movie to muffle any inadvertant sound leaks from my untimely bowl-filling. Surely there was no way Monkey or Daisy would hear me?

Wrong. Very, very wrong. Daisy definitely heard me, and began shrieking to be let out of her crate the instant the first piece of kibble touched down in here slow-feeder plastic bowl. Realising that the game was up, I hurried through the remaining preparations as quickly as I could, headed back into the lounge – closing all the doors behind me – and tried to bury myself in the movie. Surely Daisy would calm down and surrender to sleep in a few minutes? The clock notched up five minutes of concentrated wailing, then ten, then fifteen. I saw no way out of this but directly through it; to give in would have set a very dangerous Beagle precedent, and anyway what else could I have done? Let her get up and have a small down-payment on her breakfast? Bad idea.  This was grin-and-bare-it time. The film was playing at a pretty high volume, but Daisy’s volume was turned up even higher. She peaked at 2o minutes with a screaming fit that would have had the neighbours calling doggy rescue charities if they’d heard it, but then the volume and the frequency of vocalisations subsided. All this from the little girl who needed trips to the Sensory Depravation Restaurant to get her to eat properly when she was a pup.

Monkey undoubtedly was awake and aware thoughout the whole saga, but he never made so much as a squeak.   I do note however that when I finally went to bed that night, he let out a grumble and sigh as I entered the room as if to say “Oi, be quiet Dad, there’s puppies trying to sleep in here.”

Beanie & Biggles famously claimed dibs on a dead cow on the beach, while Poppy got herself a pair of bunny pants, but Monkey & Daisy have just landed the winning card in the game of doggy Top Trumps by scoring a whole whale.

Local papers had noted that a dead whale had washed up on the beach the previous day, but they’d also indicated that the coastguard was on the verge of removing it, so I expected it to be gone when we arrived for our run. Daisy immediately knew better, smelling something novel and exciting while we were still in the car park, but my nose remained blissfully unaware of the whale until we were less than a couple of hundred yards from it. By that time, the arm I was using to hold onto the leads had already been stretched about an inch longer than it’s counterpart.

I made a point of keeping a good distance from the carcass; its tongue was hugely swollen and apparently Police had been warning walkers not to get too close for fear that the whale’s guts could explode. If only the council had thought to erect “Beware: exploding whale” signs on the beach; that would have been very Pythonesque. They had however turned off the electronic sign informing visitors of the water quality, but if it had been working I guess it would have read “Absolutely minging”. We didn’t go into the water, and we didn’t approach the whale, but the beach’s resident tractor did both, tentatively trying to nudge the body further into the sea while avoiding getting trapped in the wet sand. Monkey became very interested in the tractor but Daisy’s attention never wavered from the whale and the jog back to the van was punctuated with lots of “throwing out the anchor” manoeuvres. In the end I actually had to pick Daisy up and carry her part of the way, otherwise we’d have spent the whole day at the beach.