Handbags and Poobags: Tales of a Soho Boxer Dog (7 page)

Chapter 14: THE MAKING OF MISTAKES

Probably the main mistake was getting a dog in the first place because we sometimes felt so ill-equipped to deal with him.  (I often wonder what happens to those people who buy tiny, fashionable dogs to keep in their handbags then realise they are responsible for a life?)

But yes like most people I make mistakes, many of them related to dog ownership. I have made the following errors and wouldn’t recommend them to any dog owner:

• After a walk in the local dog toilet – my friend’s rather charming name for the little patches of ring-fenced land you find in London laid on for a dog’s convenience – Basil’s paws were obviously covered in other dogs poop. For some reason I can’t explain I thought spraying him with bleach would be a good idea. As I set about him with the toxic spray Patrick came running in crying ‘
  you can’t do that he’s a living creature’
    I’m really not sure what I was thinking.
  

• During a raucous gathering of drunken ladies round mine that we laughably called ‘Book Club’ Basil managed to escape.  An attendee had left our gate open and on letting her in he had seen his way free into the open main road outside our house.  It was the first time he had done it and was still very small. I hared off after him and screamed and screamed as I dodged cars in my bare feet. His imminent death would certainly be my fault. I didn’t calm down all evening, even after he was safely indoors and had panic dreams for a few nights after.
  

• I’ve let him eat grapes and chocolate – both of which are toxic to dogs – after carelessly exclaiming ‘
  a little bit won’t do him any harm’
  , which is terribly dangerous because you never know how your dog will react. Thankfully Basil has always been a good at vomiting and if he ever does eat anything that disagrees with him you’ll find it in a wet pile on the floor only minutes later.
  

• I’ve lost count of the times I’ve put the spoon in my mouth after serving up a tin of dog food. It’s automatic isn’t it? Finish dishing up something tasty you suck on the spoon. Except it isn’t tasty. In fact it doesn’t taste of anything. It is more of a ‘feeling’. Gelatinous. If you’ve never had dog food in your mouth trust me on this one.
  

• I once had to get hold of Basil for some reason when he was running away from me. I rushed up behind him and grabbed his back-end as he squirmed around, but as my fingers closed around him one of my thumbs kept on going... I had pressed it right into his bum! He whipped round to look at me. We locked eyes for a split second, both of us absolutely appalled, before I plucked out my offending digit with a sob and ran off to wash my hands. We circled each other warily for a few hours after that, neither sure how to approach the other ever again.
  

Chapter 15: THE KINGDOM OF BED

As I have said before this is not a training book and nothing you read here should be taken as a recommendation for your own dog if you have one - especially this bit about the BED! Every trainer or training book will tell you not to allow your dog to sleep with you, it’s something to do with the dog feeling equal or superior to you. I really tried to subscribe to this as I felt strongly about keeping Basil in his place and having the marital bed as sacred to me and Patrick. However, despite my best efforts, all three of us sleep together now in one big pile - like packs of dogs in the wild.

Here’s how this came about and the problems associated with letting your dog sleep on your bed. After Basil had got used to us and the house a bit more we tried to leave him downstairs at night with the light off and the door shut, it seems harsh but he had his favourite chair to sleep on and access to his outside space. Despite looking at us miserably as we closed the door and scampered up to our clean bed, it didn’t really seem to worry him and he was usually quiet throughout the night. However, as soon as dawn broke and any light started filtering through to his room the barking would start – little questioning woofs at first but building up to full blown roaring. Now, there is an argument that if you have a dog you should always be up and ready for the walking and feeding and watering, however, when the dog in question is woofing from first light in summer around 5am then the argument is flawed. 

In order to stop the dawn chorus coming from downstairs (and in all probability annoying the neighbours) one of us would have to get up and let him out of his room. The little devil was always ready to shoot up the stairs and jump straight onto the bed – after a quick cuddle he would promptly fall straight back to sleep and get quite indignant when we had to re-emerge bleary eyed to get ready for work just a few hours later. Yes, thanks for that boy.

The morning cuddles became quite a tradition and eventually Basil was so at home on the bed that some evenings he would be allowed to spend all night on the bed ‘
as a treat’
thanks to Daddy – it was usually a night when Mummy was a bit tipsy and therefore too weak to put up a fight and only allowed on the presumption that we would put him back downstairs the next night.  After a few
‘treat’
nights in a row it was eventually considered ‘
cruel
’ to put him back downstairs and after a discussion I discovered that ‘
Basil sleeps up here now doesn’t he
?’  So there we go, the three of us now sleep together on the bed. It helps that we have a large bed but now that Basil has grown considerably from when he was a pup you can’t hide the fact that it is like having a third person curled up with you - usually around knee height – meaning my husband and I have had to develop some unusual sleeping shapes in order to accommodate him. 

He creates a kind of black hole in the middle of the bed that all duvets and bedspreads get sucked into, he honestly has his own linen orbit. For some reason he weighs a lot more at night than during the day. We are forever pulling the duvet round ourselves trying to avoid waking up in the night with half our body exposed to the cold while Basil burrows into his cosy nest between us.

And he really fights for that position on the bed. As soon as we start making moves to retire for the evening you can guarantee that if Basil isn’t already up there (he often takes himself off to bed early to get a good spot) he’ll be up the stairs before you’ve locked the front door and turned the lights off. And as he has got older and bolder he has started staging a coup for the prime pillow spot – it’s not enough that he sleeps on the bed he likes to have his head on a pillow too. Woe betide the last one in bed because you’ll find both top positions gone.

Once when I was particularly slow in getting ready, I came into the bedroom to find Patrick reading on his side of the bed and Basil on mine with the duvet pulled up around him and eyeing me warily. I pretended to get into the bottom of the bed to make my point that we were both in the wrong place, hoping that he might realise that he should be down there, not me, and move. He merely lifted his head up from the pillow, looked at me witheringly for a couple of seconds, before snuggling back down, shutting his eyes and seeming to fall asleep immediately. I felt so reduced I almost did sleep at the bottom of the bed that night.

The getting ready for bed routine can be touching though – the time Basil was a bit late in getting off the sofa and following us up to bed had us running round in glee getting the bed exactly as we liked it before he arrived. We felt terrible when we turned round to see him eagerly making his way towards the bedroom with his favourite toy bear in his mouth as if to say ‘
sorry I’m late I was just getting my teddy’.

He also likes to turn endless circles before he settles down, going round and round and getting in the way of the TV or treading on your feet until he has got himself completely ready to plump down in the exact, correct position. Patrick says that this behaviour comes from wolves having to tread down the reeds in the wild to create a comfortable, circular clearing in which to sleep. I don’t mind Basil displaying natural instincts but my sheets have a high thread count and are nothing like reeds.

I have to be honest here – it does play havoc with your love life. You just don’t have the spontaneity of turning a gorgeous morning cuddle into something more when you have a dog lying between you. And he is usually snoring and farting. Yes, it’s true, out of the three of us the dog definitely snores the loudest and his farts are absolutely terrible, as he grows older they get louder and smellier.

Quick aside here about farts
: we used to find the fact our tiny puppy did them hilarious! They made cute noises and were virtually odourless. Now our big tripe eating hound makes loud embarrassing cracks that force us to push him off the sofa while holding our breath. Sometimes they are so strong they actually hurt to inhale. We call them ‘
aerosol shits’
because it can honestly smell like a muck spreader has sprayed some hideous turds into the room.  You can cope when you are at home, but when you are in the pub or in the office it’s not so good. People are affronted that you have allowed your dog to assault their nostrils so badly. We usually greet each emission with a curt ‘
Dirty Dog
’ it’s a satisfying phrase to say and makes sure anyone near you knows where the blame lies (and of course is a useful foil for any human stinkers!)

Anyway, back to bed… so yes, we find it hard to be as intimate as often as we would like thanks to the third member of our household making the bed his own. However, Basil seems unperturbed when we do. There has often been an occasion when thinking he was downstairs we have been getting frisky only to look round in the heat of the moment to find him staring at us questioningly, head cocked to one side, with a toy in his mouth as if to say ‘
what ARE you doing
?’ A few times he has leapt up on the bed halfway through much to our surprise and once we were so carried away we just put the duvet over him and carried on as he settled down to sleep through it. 

There are other downsides to letting the dog sleep in the bed. My main problem is Dog Dust. This is what we call the film of grit that seems to accumulate after only a couple of days. It is made up of mud, dog hair and general dirt, you can’t really see it but you can feel it when you run your hand over the sheets, like invisible sand, and it drives me mad. The calm sanctuary of the bedroom is a thing of the past for us as I am always furiously rubbing down the sheets before I get into bed complaining and muttering about how ‘
the bloody dog shouldn’t be allowed up here anyway’
and ‘
now I am going to have to change the sheets again’
. I know everyone says it but honestly for me sometimes there is no greater pleasure than being the first to get into a newly changed bed.

Sharing your bed with a dog is so hard on your sheets, Egyptian cotton gets snagged and expensive bedspreads always end up looking mucky, and he always licks everything. Gone are the days when the bed can look fresh and white – I now favour darker coloured bed linen as I just can’t bear to look at another paw print in the middle of a new white duvet cover and really, I would rather not know what all of the mysterious smudges are. We often laugh that if we were all murdered in our bed the forensic team would have a field day.

Instead of a temple to sleep and relaxation the bed has become a kind of dog playground. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I have slipped thankfully between the sheets only to find I am nestled up against a particularly ripe piece of cowhide or a saliva covered chew toy.

And if I decide he has to get off the bed – say if I have just changed the sheets and want to keep them free of the dreaded Dog Dust for at least until we all get into bed – he won’t let me get anywhere near him. He’ll spin round and round rucking up the sheets or hide under the covers. (Once while I was changing the sheets I left the mattress exposed for the day and Basil chewed all of the buttons off of it). Yes, I would say the bed is most definitely his.

But I would just say that, despite everything, I love seeing him stretch out in absolute bliss on the bed, he really extends to his full length in total joy. We call him the Longest Dog in The World. Sometimes he sleeps between us like a third person, and he is so happy and relaxed that we can all go to sleep with his head on the pillow next to ours and wake up eight hours later to find that he hasn’t moved an inch all night.

And he can be so funny asleep – when he is in a deep, deep slumber his eyes slightly open but roll back into his head so we only see the redness, we call it Zombie Dog (“
walkies, sit, brains
”) and he starts dreaming. We always know when he is dreaming as he starts ‘wiffling’ which is a kind of soft yelping bark - or talking in your sleep for dogs - accompanied by a twitching leg. We know his fantasy of running with a football before a dinner of sardines is running film-like through his sleepy head. Sometimes he gets so carried away with his ‘wiffling’ that he starts shaking madly, juddering from side to side and waking everyone up, while he carries on sleeping regardless.