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

Wednesday November 22nd 2017

It’s the day after I blocked Hairy One’s escape route through the gap between two garages. Today as she skips merrily round the bend in the lane she continues past the recessed garage, the site of her previous misdemeanour.

She plays happily up and down the lane. After an hour, it’s nearly time to go home and I am at the bend waiting for her. I’m not in the slightest bit concerned when she ducks out of sight into the recess where the gap is.

BOIOIOING!

What the hell’s that

BOIOIOING! BOIOIOING!

It sounds like whippy sticks being bashed against metal.

BOIOIOING! BOIOIOING! BOIOIOING

It definitely is whippy sticks being bashed against metal.

I set off at a fast limp. There’s the little so and so, bottom flat on the concrete, teeth firmly clamped round the springy stems of the dead clematis which I had carefully woven in and out of the brambles I’d used to block the gap. The stems are firmly rooted in the ground so there’s no way even Isis can uproot them.

When she’s pulled them as taut as she can, her teeth slide off them and they spring back against the aluminium of the garage doors.

BOIOIOING!

“Isis! You little b!”, I shriek. She can’t hear me, of course, but she knows I’m approaching, and reaching back into the mouth of the gap, grasps a large bramble, wheels round smartly  and runs off down the lane, with it.

Sadly, I’m not quick enough to capture her on camera while she’s twanging the clematis stems, but at least I manage to get some proof that I’m not making it all up.

Eventually, she tires of this prickly game and abandons the bramble. It was about twelve feet long when she first removed it but now there are several sections strewn around the lane.

While she pops off to play another game, I pick up the bramble bits. The blood red thorns are vicious and grow so close together it is impossible to find a clear patch big enough to get my finger and thumb round.

How on earth does she avoid tearing her little pink mouth?, I wonder, as I ow, argh and ouch my way back to the recess. I leave the brambles  by the re-opened gap. They’ll be re-used tomorrow.

The next day, armed once more with secateurs and thick gardening gloves, I cut down the longest, curlyist brambles I can find and ram them several feet deep into the gap.

That should deter even the most determined Portugese podengo    …………………….

Shouldn’t it?

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