streams of unconsciousness

(I am writing this post on my phone, so I’m a slave to autocorrect. Any errors are purely unintentional)

So.

Pupper and I do walkies.

We do big walking in the big big big open spaces.

And we do them off-lead, because pupper is a good girl, doing very well at pupper training classes, and is never more than 3m in front of me or 3m behind.

Pupper and I love our walkies.

What we don’t love so much are some of the people we meet on our walkies.

But not all of them, because some of them are lovely.

Like Sue, for example, who runs our pupper training classes.

Sue always stops for a chat, even though she’s wrangling three grown-up dogs of her own.

She says nice things like ‘I wouldn’t have believed this was the same puppy you had in class last week.’

At least I think that’s meant in a nice way.

But then there are the other people.

Some of them are real counts.

They can be rude. They can be obnoxious. And they can always be total counts.

This morning (it was 6am when the pupper and I encountered her, so perhaps she’s always a really grumpy teat with a face like a slapped arsenal) we turned a corner in the field and encountered one such count.

She said, ‘Don’t pick him up, you’re only teaching him to be frightened of other dogs.’

What a duck.

The reason I picked HER up was because the grumpy old teat had no control over her own off-lead dog, that was tracking pupper like a Rapier missile rangefinder.

If I wanted the pupper to socialise (which she does very well, with the other puppers, at pupper training class, I would have said ‘By jove, you’re right. I should just let your out of control dog do what it wants with our three-month old pupper. You are indeed a wise and wonderful woman!’

Except she certainly wasn’t wise, obvs.

But why would she even think that me protecting the pupper from a dog I hadn’t seen before, an off-lead dog, and an off-lead dog that was ignoring every single voice command from the woman, would be a bad thing?

Bad for whom?

Bad for the pupper? (if so, please explain in no less than 550 words and give an example of howso)

Then there was the other fat old count, a few days ago, who had an off-lead dog called Tess.

Tess was an expert at ignoring voice commands.

The fat old count’s ‘Oh leave it alone Tess’ (where ‘it’ is our pupper, who was the target of Tess, bearing down on her like a locked-on Exocet missile) was studiously ignored.

Until I stepped between Tess and the pupper.

At that point the fat old count said ‘Come on Tess’.

Tess decided, at that point, that continuing with the person she ignored rather than duke it out with me was the better of the two options.

So far these are the only two examples of stupid teats, but both of them managed to take stupidity to a whole new level of countiness.

What a pair of duckheads

There has been a lot of dogging going on in these parts lately. And in different dogging formats too.

There’s been the freestyle dogging where we’ve been doing our own thing, like the bunch of dogging rebels that we are.

And then there’s been the more organised group dogging sessions where dogging instructors have been taking us through rewards-based dogging.

Having a puppy has meant lots of changes for us as a household and as individuals.

I can no longer pee standing up. Whenever I do, I get a pointy puppy beak poking between my legs as she tries to climb into the toilet bowl while I’m still peeing.

But when I have a safety wee the puppy comes in the bathroom and keeps guard, in her own way.

I have become adept at brushing my teeth while said puppy dangles from the belt of my bathrobe.

Having a shower has also become a hazardous activity. The first time I thought ‘that feels suspiciously like someone licking my shins’ as I struggled to get the burning Head and Shoulders out of my eyes, came as something of a shock.

That the puppy could climb up the side of the bath and, equally deftly, climb out again afterwards, came as a big surprise.

She has a great affinity with water, as we’re rapidly learning.

I’m becoming used to receiving a puppy wash at 5am, and equally used to having a puppy sit on my shoulder while watching TV in the evenings.

I can no longer go horizontal on the settee – doing so earns me a puppy sitting on my chest and I have to wear it like some kind of badge or honour.

Singing fascinates her. Specifically, me singing fascinates her, but me playing the guitar doesn’t affect her one way or another. That’s just bizarre.

Like proud parents we’ve gone past the ‘having to get up at 1.30am to take her outside for a wee’ stage. Yes, she now goes through the night.

*proud parent face*

Anyway.

The group dogging sessions… well… it’s early days. All we’re hoping for is some manners on the lead and a strongly-learned set of recall and ‘stop that’ rules.

We’re fortunate, there’s a canine training academy in the village, and it’s fair to say we have high hopes of a set of positive outcomes.

She’s got some rough puppy-edges, but every now and then we get a good long look at how we think she’s going to turn out, with some training and careful upbringing.

I think it’s going to be fun. I think she’s going to be fun.