Another early Saturday morning, it’s 06:40, the two latest editions to the menagerie have slept through from 10:30 last evening, it’s a steady progress. They both awaken because I am strirring, two tiny creature with noisy squeaks and whines greet me with such sweet innocence and beauty, how on earth can you get angry with anything quite so lovely?

Little Missy is sat in her bed, made up of a dark brown suede effect with a green and light brown tartan cushion, this one also chewed to pieces, just like the two previous. Yes, she’s a minx alright, of the previous, a zip runner had gone missing, however it was found twelve hours later in one of her steaming hot precious dog eggs. This of course does explain why she was having an off day,  I certainly wouldn’t have liked what she was experiencing. She just sits there and stares at me, waiting for my hand to enter her territory within the cage and pick up her empty dish, she pounces, I coordinate badly. As gravity takes over, it hits the side of the water bowl, making enough noise to wake the dead and empties the content on the floor. At this point little happy bouncy ‘monkey boy’ stirs, he bounds out of his matching dog cave and leaps onto my arm like a sexual deviant, his greeting consists of a sharp dew claw grasp and a fine toothed ‘Boston’, If you know about wrestling, you would understand that particular movement. In fine fettle they both start to sing their greeting. Hurriedly, I get the first meal of the day prepared, half a tub of ‘Butchers Dog’ puppy food each, lowering the meal gently into the enclosures, I am aware that each canine food critic is short of a napkin and manners, any that may have been learned are immediately dismissed, each are head in before bowls are on the floor, quickly I return to pour two tiny casuelas of puppy milk, not very pleasant in aroma I must add. In true haphazard style the contents are spilled from the plastic bottle decorated in the bi-colours of the Plymouth Argyle football club strip, I struggle to put the green screw top back on to the white bottle single handledly. Knowingly, and by how it is lapped up quickly, means it’s mighty damn good for them. I stand back, chest plumped out, ….that’s our babies!

Untrained puppies are such devious little rat bags, they have no conception of any value or worth. We must have changed at least a thousand pee mats in just over a month, but they  make it so much easier to keep an area clean of spillage from loose excretionary orifaces than rather have scrub carpets. No sooner as clean pens shine, there are stinking patterns and pee stains not dissimilar to drip paintings by non other than the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollack. Perhaps this could be my big break, especially with a new idea for Dragons Den, all we would need are ready made frames and a certificate of authenticity.

I check my watch, it reads ten minutes to eight, perhaps if I sit quietly on the electric recliner chair and set to mortuary position one, maybe the dancing macaques will quieten down, especially if I pull the cover over myself completely. Hoping for an hours extra rest, at least. From the morgue slab the corpse breathes out its last breaths of shhh’s and coooes, the creatures start to take note and settle, they haven’t twigged yet that biggest monster of them all is under the sheet …… oh the indignity of it all!

Lesson number uno, if other dogs are in the household, feed them also, even if it’s happens to be almost three hours earlier for them. They will not settle, until so done. Rspecially when trying to sneak an extra hour of morning rest. At least tomorrow i’l be prepared for that one.