It’s a Dog’s Life - The Quiet Life

Monday, 14 August 2023 09:00

By Helen Stockton

Teddy is looking forward to a chilled out month of rest and relaxation, hopefully with some sunshine to bathe in, as Helen Stockton, his human translator explains.

August can be a relatively quiet month for a lot of people. The schools are closed, folk are disappearing off on their holidays and it feels like the whole nation is loosening the leash and opening the treat tin!

Quiet is not a word normally associated with Border Terriers. Like many of our canine kith and kin, we have a view on everything and we are not afraid to share. Myself and the apprentice, Bear, belong to a Twitter group, the BT Posse, and every now and then we have a gathering of the clan, in person rather than virtually, something we fondly refer to as a Tweet-up. If you arrive late on one of those occasions, it’s easy to find where the muster point is, you just listen! ‘Her Indoors’ reckons that if there was a collective noun for a group of us, it would be a bark of Borders. I can’t think what she means.

I am normally quite a vocal fur and have a range of utterances from full on barking, to what ‘Her Indoors’ rather dismissively refers to as muttering into my beardage. I also have quite a deep bark which is a useful asset as people tend to assume it comes from a bigger dog. They are often surprised when I put in an appearance. Bear, on the other paw, has a rather high-pitched, squeaky little bark, which can make your ears ring when deployed at close range. In terms of our pecking order, if that’s the right term for dogs, I have the size advantage; I am quite large for a Border Terrier, and she is rather petite, but what she lacks in stature she makes up for in volume. She just barks at full blast, until I give in and relinquish whatever it is I’ve got that she wants, usually my bed, even though she’s got an identical one of her own. Anything for a quiet life.

‘Them Indoors’ normally have quite a quiet August too. Our Juniors are grown up, so we are not tied to school holiday times and normally save our vacation until it’s a bit less busy, in September. ‘Her Indoors’ freelance work tends to go quiet when folk are on holiday and ‘Him Indoors’ is retired so, as far as I can see, life is one big holiday for him, a bit like us really. So this month is a pottering about kind of time when we shall be supervising odd jobs in the house and garden, even more closely supervising the occasional barbeque and, when all of that seems like too much effort, quietly sleeping in the sun. I warmly, if you’ll excuse the pun, recommend it!

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It’s a Dog’s Life - The Quiet Life

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