I have fallen in love over the last week. A decade after a messy divorce and the heart of the ice queen is starting to melt and I have been experiencing a rush of emotions I haven’t for a long time. I have a deep mistrust for men these days, (infact anything with nuts) and had resigned myself to living alone for the rest of my days with my pets. Briar my dear little Jack Russell, had been a loyal companion for over 15 years and at the beginning of the year the pearly gates of doggy heaven opened for my mate and I was gutted.
Coming home from work at lunch time was a pointless exercise with no wagging tail to meet me, the house seemed empty and my morning walks dried up. Reg the cat mourned her passing with me and while we continued about our business the house seemed empty. There was no longer in-house fighting between the canine and feline residents of the property and after a couple of weeks all the tufts of coarse white hair that I used to curse when she was alive had been vacuumed away , and all her personal effects had been bundled up and put out of sight in an effort to make the loss less painful.
It wasn’t all bad though. The weekly shopping bill was less expensive, I could travel away from the property without wondering who would feed the dog, and the absence of those pesky dog hairs meant I could reduce the vacuuming to once a week. I thought long and hard about finding something to fill the void that had been left with her passing and after having a sharing a couple of gins on a summers evening with a friend I decided I needed to get another dog. Briar was part of that meeting, parked up on the table in the fancy urn that now holds her ashes, as I grappled with feelings of disloyalty about making the decision to get another dog.
In 15 years since I had purchased Briar, the price of dogs has escalated and I was tightening every sphincter when I realised that I was going to have to part with about a fortnights wages to buy something that would suit my lifestyle and home. I scanned the internet for small dogs needing re-homing or adopted and asked around. I even found one a few hours away that might have been suitable, but once I found out the scrutiny process I would be under before I was even allowed to be put on a waiting list for an adoption, I gave up on that idea in disgust.
I would have to buy a puppy. The mere thought of spending the next couple of years training something to behave in a civil manner was outweighed in the cost benefit analysis I did when I crunched the numbers. I rationalised that if I get 15 years out of another dog and the first two are full of rescuing shoes, filling in freshly dug holes, mopping up accidents, and training it to be a model canine, then the reward of 13 trouble-free years of joy as I slip into my golden years must far outweigh that?
Enter Finnlater Montgomery Castle-Wilson. (Finn for short). He’s a Cairn terrier, who at 10 weeks old is full of piss and importance but already is melting the hearts of everyone he meets. He comes to work in the morning with me in the traveling cage I brought all the way home from South America for him ,before returning to his home cage for a rest in the afternoon. His toilet training is going well and while he is suitably impressed with the large selection of expensive toys he has in his collection to date, his attention span needs some working on. He has annoyed Reg immensely with his arrival, and while she has moved back into the house in the last couple of days after taking off in disgust when he first moved in, she is treating him with disdain. That hasn’t helped by the fact that he has taken to dragging her scratching pole around the lounge and barking at her from a distance. Her attitude will soften I expect as she realises that he is here to stay. Miss Marple the grey Orpington hen who has been on strike for two months in the fowl house has been scared into giving birth to an egg this morning after being looking at curiously for a week. I am thankful this has happened as I had been looking at the soup pot thinking what good stock she would make. On a small property like this everyone needs to pull their weight and she has let the team down badly over recent times.
Anyway, I am stoked with the new man in my life. His nuts will disappear a little down the track before he starts humping everything in sight and I rue the day I weakened and let a male in the house . I will enjoy the wonder of everything new he manages to come across and the joy that I feel in my heart when I realise how much I love him already - despite the fact that he has wrecked one of my good Merrell shoes and managed to pull a vase of flowers of the table when he won the tug of war with the table cloth!h ,as I am not naive enough to think there wont be hair-raising moments along the way.
