Eleanor will be away most of this week on business. Today she is in Paris, which sounds great but when you leave at five in the morning and are back fifteen hours later and all you did was have a two hour meeting – perhaps not. Regardless – this is our chance to shine! In the dog world, ‘shine’ can be interpreted as ‘destroy anything we can find’.

We started the day by ditching Ugly Betty during breakfast in favour of Everybody Loves Raymond but that’s mostly because I got up late after driving to the train station at 5am. An interesting statistic is worth noting down here for future dog owners:

Time to make breakfast: 3 or 4 minutes • Time to eat breakfast: 30 seconds. It is not a major event in the day that consumes a lot of time. That’s wishful thinking. It’s there to be eaten as fast as possible in case somebody comes along and steals it. Fully fuelled, the Destoyer of Worlds, the Unbringer of Calm may commence with the day…

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One of the more, umm… annoying aspects of Hector’s behaviour is that he hasn’t got the gist of playing by himself yet – we’re working on it. I don’t recall ever having a dog in the past that was the equivalent of the Marx Brothers following you around all day long, so today we’re going to try something new. It’s called ‘I’m in charge’ – me not him. We’ll see how this goes. To start with, being as I’m half asleep, I’m going to simply ignore him if I can and try and figure out if and how he likes to play by himself for a little while.

A little later: apparently we can do it! Chewing on a ten inch roasted bull’s penis (which frankly, stinks – you can get them here) is the answer! I think I’ll leave him to it while he’s quiet and then we’ll have a real play after Raymond…

Slightly later: Mr Poindexter (a squeaky pheasant thing) has had a rough time this morning. When we got bored of Mr Poindexter, we got Weasel out and played tug of war with that instead. After lunch, we went out for a walk… which passed without incident which is good but when we got back he still wanted to play, so we played “Car Wash” for a little while. I’ll explain what that is one day but as always, it tired both of us out…

Later that same day: this afternoon while playing by himself, he chewed up: an empty coke bottle, my hand, a shoe, a wellington, my hand, the bull thing, nibbled on the corner of a book, the washing that dared hang down, his cushion, my hand, a brush, the radiator pipe, a snail, a stone… and then I stopped paying attention unless it was dangerous. He has some serious teeth coming through so I’m not holding it against him. How could you be cross at something with a face like this anyway:

This is Mr Poindexter. He is not long for this world:

So that’s been our day so far. We even did ten minutes of clicker training after lunch with a post-it note stuck on the wall so that he actually had to make an effort instead of the lazy drive-by he does sometimes when you put things on the floor.

I might need to up my game tomorrow.

S