Not good enough....

Haggis is a funny ol' sausage. He has his own fixed little ways and gets quite upset if anything ruffles his feathers and gets in the way. Take the way he quietly decided that as humans decide to sit down to eat, a dog should take himself off upstairs to sleep on the humans' bed till the meal is over. Nobody trained him to, nobody asked him to, it's just a Haggis thing.

Or there's the way that in his world when the phone rings somebody answers it, or when an alarm clock sounds, somebody should wake up, reach out and turn it off. If either of these things happen and the expected response does not, he will start off with a few tentative howls, and quickly build into the full heart-breaking, pain-filled anguish of it all OwwwooooOOOOO!!!!!

When Dad's alarm goes off (about 04:15) Haggis and I wake immediately and follow Dad downstairs to be there wide awake while he breakfasts and gets ready for work. We get let out (with Meggie, who's already downstairs by now), then Dad goes off patting us and giving us the farewell dog-treat, shuts the door and heads round to the car.

Barely is the car off the drive, than we have sprinted back upstairs to get back in or on bed with Mum. Haggis's habit is to come round to Mum's side of the bed, scratching at the woodwork to wake Mum enough to be helped in (he's more than capable of jumping on - it's just another Haggis thing). There are, here too, standards to be observed.

Mum was a bit put out and amused recently when two nights running the "service" she gave was clearly not up to standards. Once he didn't like that she'd only let him on the bed, so he jumped back off and scratched again, markedly asking to be let in under the covers. Another time, when she'd not quite given him enough room, he braced his spine against her and nudged hard to move her over. When, in her dozy state she grumped at him and refused to move, he walked round and poked her sleepy face with his cold wet nose to make sure she got the message. She ended up, she reports, sleeping on "Dad's side of the bed".

Meanwhile, a strange new shaggy dog on the Rec, young Petra. She is a poodle cross Lowchen. Lowch-a-doodle? Westie sized but black and as shaggy as one of those Briards. We'd not heard of a Lowchen, but here it is, as bold as brass on Google - a Little Lion Dog. Hi Petra, welcome to our little 16:30 doggie group

http://www.thelowchenclubuk.com/

Deefski