Tag: dog

The world’s best friend

When we were young we would fall out with our friends over the slightest thing. She took the last jelly tot. He splashed you with a puddle. They didn’t include you in the game of hopscotch. We are fickle beings. We see the bad before treasuring the good.

As we grow older the jelly tot arguments turn more sour. She chose to see her other friends. He cheated. They spoke behind your back. We are fickle creatures. We see the bad before treasuring the good.

When we are old the jelly tot arguments turn to mould. She left me behind. He broke my heart. They were right. We are fickle beasts. We see the bad before treasuring the good.

The thing is you shared those jelly tots with the girl who introduced you to friendship. You welcomed the guy into your life who taught you to love and how to pick yourself up and look for love again because of how it made you feel. They spoke behind your back and it’s just what you needed to put up with less shit in your life. You saw the bad before treasuring the good.

In life a friend will come that won’t ask anything from you, will sit by you whether you’ve spared a kind word or not, will forget when you have yelled because they are making too much noise and will bound towards the door every day for 5 years because they thought you weren’t coming back again.

They will pull you forward despite the beating sun, the long spiky grass, the torrential rain.

They race up and down the stairs like a loony to make you laugh when you introduce your new boyfriend to the family.

They eat any unoccupied food when you’re not looking. They know they shouldn’t but it just smells so damn good. 

They never bite or growl, wimper or leave your side.

They are the world’s companion. They are your best friends.

They are the good that you treasure.

Photo by Dave Watson
Please check out his work on https://www.instagram.com/davewatson_uk/ or at https://davewatson1980.picfair.com

All part of the narrative

If you have read my last few blogs you may have seen how excited I’ve been to set up our pool for the summer. We are yet to use it properly and with the impending heat wave of doom it feels like we are halfway to actually surviving it. 

The thing is, when you own your very own property things can change really quickly. Obviously I don’t think there is a curse placed on mortgage payers, but it can be a kick in the gut (and wallet) when something unforeseen happens. Usually for us its technology, last year we had a 6 month struggle with our boiler. 6 months prior to that, our dishwasher upped and fucked off due to a internal complication I think it made up quite personally. 12 months previously to that, our fridge freezer decided it wanted to shuffle off its mortal coils. And fun stuff like that seems to happen a lot when you have zero back up plan and really would like to have some savings building up. This week, our cat decided to check out our pool and punctured its air-filled dreaminess. Mr W and I have spent all of 30 minutes in its cool depths, all of those in the shade. Frustrated is not the word. We are yet to find the tiny hole that is deflating our hopes and dreams. 

The problem with owning a house is there’s no landlord or council that has a duty of care and maintenance to come and fix said items. I mean, if you rent and burst your swimming pool and Landlord Larry will fix it for you, well quite frankly, when can I move in? 

It’s a delicate line to tread when owning your home. On one side there’s the fear of something breaking and checking the sofa for coins to fix the problem. The constant cycle of decorating and learning about electrics and plumbing and a whole host of DIY skills. We had a flood during the lockdown of 2020 because the pump for the electric shower decided it needed a laugh. The flood rained down through a newly installed ceiling and we haven’t been able to fix the pump whatsoever. It sits waiting for the next big project. If I had decided to kick the pump around the garden like a football I’d understand. If I had run the dishwasher for 24 hours straight for a month I’d understand. But technology truly has a mind of its own. 

The pool however, did not decide to deflate. Our ginger Tom saw to that. He is like a moth to a flame when it comes to water. He likes it colder than cold, fresher than fresh and will nick your tea or wine if unattended. The boy is a liquid lusting whore. I could scream and shout, I actually want to, but I learned years ago that our animal friends, our pets, companions, and family are a blessing. If he had sat on that decking, drawn out a claw and run it down the plastic much like someone would key a car, then I’d be having words. However the simple fact is, he wanted water, he went for it. It is his quirk. Much like our other cat’s quirk is to want attention just as you are falling asleep or the other’s is to claw his way up your leg to say hello. Much like Sylvester Stallone in ‘Cliffhanger’. They don’t do it to annoy us. Nor to irritate or make angry. It’s just them. 

I have lost patience with previous animal loves and you can’t take it back. I regret how I used to tell off our dog about peeing in the home. She wasn’t well and I wish I had been kinder. I used to get exasperated about the mess. But the truth is, I’d do it all over again for more time with her. The same goes for our black moggy who we lost in 2019. She would scream at me from the kitchen counter for food. All day she’d cry. And I would cry back at her. ‘Yes, yes, in a minute.’ What I would give to hear those sounds again. What I’d give to have learnt more patience back then. But now, I live with those lessons and what it has taught me. 

The truth is, I let our cats get away with murder, they are pampered beyond belief and I think thats because they’ll never understand just how much they mean to us so I find other ways to make sure they know. They’ve been there every single day during lockdown. They give me cuddles on my bad days. They give me a reason to get up. They’re true companions. 

So when one yaks up on the floor, I’ll sigh and grab the kitchen towel. When there’s a puddle of pee because our tiled floor is better than the flower beds and grass, I’ll shake my head and get the mop. Because we brought them into this home, we chose them. They are entitled to be who they are. I can have the patience for them and their quirks. 

The same goes for the quirks of this house, technology has a shelf life. It shouldn’t but it does. A burst pipe, dodgy electrics and so on goes part and parcel with the mortgage. Would we have rented if we’d have realised all this in the beginning? No, of course not. Owning this house means our hard earned savings went somewhere and will one day pay for our retirement or travelling or even be handed down to our kids. It is something worthy of being patient about. However frustrating and hard it can be and often is. 

It was our choice to buy this place. The same as inviting our furry pals to live with us. It’s all about choice. So when something bursts, breaks or fizzles its electrics out of whack I will have a moment of disbelief, that’s only natural, but I’ll also take what I’ve learned about patience and carry on. It’s all part of the narrative. 

Now I need to find the pool puncture so I can sigh in a very chilled manner!

Photo by Dave Watson
Please check out his work on https://www.instagram.com/davewatson_uk/ or at https://davewatson1980.picfair.com

Lola

I wrote this following piece in December 2020, more than anything I wrote it for me, I never shared it. For reasons I’ll explain later, I’m posting it today…

It’s a year to the day. If it was any other year I’d do the usual, where has the time gone speech. But really, where has the year gone?

Day after day sat on the sofa, watching the news, waiting for updates, fearing the worst, hoping for the best. But seriously, how has a year passed?

Time should have slowed down, it feels appropriate for the world to stop spinning when you are grieving. That the whole world will acknowledge your pain. The loss. The despair.

Lola was our dog. Our family. Our unconditionally loving friend.

The cats scattered everytime the doorbell went because Lola would bark and run through the house like a charging bull.

There was a dirty, slobbery, biscuit mark left by her muzzle on the front door. It was about a foot up from the floor, on the edge of the door and inside the frame, it was brown and sticky and gross. It was made everytime we came home and didn’t, by her standards, open the door fast enough. She’d squeeze that big ol’ head through the gap to get at us quicker. We were home. She was happy.

Her tip tapping across the tiled floors when dinner was seconds away from being hers. Her teddy that she chased up and down our garden. Never ripped or torn but carried back soaked with drool. Her bandana that made her look badass. Her youthful looks that despite her age had people asking if the figure in years was actually how old she was in months. Her loving looks at my husband. Her special hugs, sitting straight back into our arms, bobbing her paw if we stopped scratching her white chest. Her twisted claw, that never grew back quite right, after too many wild moments over the fields. Her loud, hurried crunching noises at her bowl and the fact she guzzled a whole bowl of water in seconds and trailed it through the house afterwards. Her legs kicking when chasing those dream rabbits and the hilarious snoring that caught us muting the TV to sit and laugh silently and deeply.

Her contentment at us being home.

I miss it all. I miss her. We miss her. The cats miss her. Everybody does. Why are there no other words to describe this pain. I’m not even questioning it. I’m demanding to know why there are no other words to describe this anguish. This loss. This grief. It’s a weight that holds you down. Yet without it, I fear she’s gone entirely. When the grief doesn’t catch you off guard and batter you and bruise you does it mean you have forgotten her? If love was enough, death would never have come.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, I feel guilty everyday for the times I yelled for the mess, for the noise. It is my punishment now to live with such a void. The silence in the room. No snoring. The ticking clock. No barking. The clean kitchen. No dribble.

A part of us died that day. It’s like taking a breath and never really feeling that deep breath of calm. Your lungs expand but it’s half arsed. It’s the tight, cold feeling inside the middle of your chest. It’s the shaking of your whole body when you cry those loud animalistic sobs. The sound issued from your mouth as your lungs fight to push the breath out despite your mind being overcome with grief. Your eyes expelling tear after tear with the pain of what was and now isn’t. It’s her not being here. And it’s the thought that there is no rainbow where she waits for us. There is no after where she runs. There is nothing. There’s only the sucking in of breath as you feel your insides go into shock. Life stands still.

And yet, it doesn’t, everything carries on. No one sees the destruction that is your mind and others ask when another will come. Angry. That makes me angry. Maybe it’s the process. That the anger will turn to hope. But right now, no. Tomorrow, no. A week, a month, no. No.

Her smell is gone from her collar. Her mark is gone from our door. The cats are settled in the silence.

And now in May 2022, reading that back, it’s unchanged. The pain is as fresh as ever. But it’s in the background. Like a scar. It’s present and it’ll never heal fully. It’s a reminder of what was.

This morning on my way to work, a huge truck passed, and from the passenger window a collie dog was barking at each car it passed. Laughter erupted from me so naturally that I couldn’t stop. They do that. These furry angels. They possess such a beautiful quality that lights up your life that it’s hard to let anything else darken your day. It’s not being able to tell them we love them in the conventional way that makes it so hard to say goodbye. To tell them they were so much more than they realised.

There is a psych analogy that says, ‘ Grief is like a box with a ball in it and a pain button on one side. In the early stages, the ball is very big. You cannot move the box without it frequently hitting the pain button. It rattles around on its own in there and hits the button over and over again, sometimes so much that it feels like you can’t stop it – you can’t control it – it just keeps hurting. But as time goes on, the ball gets smaller. It doesn’t disappear completely and when it hits the pain button, it’s just as intense, but generally, it is easier to get through each day.’

I want you, my lovely reader, to know that grief is natural, it’s not to be ashamed of and it’s not something to be understood. It’s a process. And it’s different for everyone. I truly believe when we lose a pet friend, it’s a different kind of grief, you don’t have words to exchange, only the hope that they know. That you gave them enough to know. I know all too well how hard it is to explain how you feel to someone who doesn’t understand. Perhaps they’ve never had a pet pal and can’t sympathise. It can be a lonely place. I’ve lost so many dear pet friends, our family furries, and it doesn’t get easier. And why should it. They add to our life in such a way without demanding anything back. Please know, you are not alone. It is the price we pay for the love we feel so deeply.

I miss her everyday. Still. It’s getting easier to think of giving a rescue dog a home. I not only miss her and the joy she brought, but I miss the joy of a dog. The unrelenting joy. But the guilt and feeling of replacing her still pushes the thought away. I hope one day we will because the scar she left behind is beautiful and will live forever. She’s still here. Wherever I go. A part of my make up. In the story of my life. Always.