Posting days: Sunday and Wednesday and, sometimes, maybe, extra ‘news flashes’!

Sunday June 19th 2016

Very British weather over the last week or so. Downpours and flash floods, sometimes for days on end.

As we know, Isis is rain crazy. Even before the porch door is opened, she knows it’s happening: the rain-flies are falling out of the sky and she can’t wait to catch them. I am currently attempting to train her to sit in the porch until I open the door and invite her to follow me, then to sit down outside on the path while I lock up.

As one might guess, waiting isn’t Hairy One’s forté. But the training isn’t going too badly.  I know that she can do it because she has learned to sit and wait until I signal that she can devour her meal. There is, of course, considerably less incentive for her to sit and wait to go out of the door. As every dog knows, it is much quicker to barge out as soon as one can; however, we are persevering, and we are beginning to make progress.

When the rain-flies are out, though, you can forget about training.

She hurls herself through the door with a loud ‘clonk’, smacks her head into my shins, and shoves her way past me and down the step. She pauses long enough for me to insert the key into the keyhole before lunging at the rain-flies causing me to stagger backwards from the step and land with a jarring thwack on the concrete.

I leave the expletives to your imagination. Now she is leaping and dancing merrily towards the gate. At least I don’t have to gather my wits quickly enough to leap ahead of her to prevent her connecting her nose with the barred iron gate like an egg entering an egg slicer: by now, she knows just where the gate is and skids to a halt a millimetre or two in front of it.

The rain is slapping against my face and dripping down my neck, and I’m already worn out by the time I guide her through the gate. But I usually manage to close it behind us before she launches herself onto the pavement.

Once we arrive in the park she is impatient to leave the car. As we twirl wildly across the rain polished tarmac, she does her best to encase me in her lead and leave me bound in the rain like a comic strip squaw.

She yanks and jerks her way along the path until, at last she is clipped onto her running lead and able to shoot, like an uncaged impala, onto the grass.

Oh joy! She springs up and down like an animated pogo stick. And up and down and up and down and up and down. Then she gallops around, extending lead fully stretched, or dips and dives like a lassoed bronco.

Over the last week or two, we have often had the park to ourselves, two drenched figures bounding across the grass in the sheeting rain, the thunder and the lightning.

Some sensible dogs dislike getting wet. Not our Isis. She relishes every soggy moment.

But, unfortunately, she hates being dried, and grumps and grumbles however gently she is patted with a very soft, lightweight, micro-fibre towel. She prefers to let the seat cover on the futon blot her dry – the part in my futon space, of course.

Enough is enough, I decide.

I order her a summer mac.

Isis came from the Aeza cat and dog rescue and adoption centre in Aljezur, Portugal. For information about adopting an animal from the centre, contact kerry@aeza.org or  www.dogwatchuk.co.uk