Rules, rules bloody rules. Everywhere you look; don’t do that, don’t touch this and leave them alone. And that’s just a quick synopsis of sexual disease literature; once we allow the eye of angst to rove into the land of puppy, it’s all you must not let your dog run, don’t let him turn round too quickly, keep him off those lethal polished floors and, if you don’t wish him to spontaneously combust, don’t even think about the mildest smidgen of exercise until at least two days after his last meal.

And then we move onto don’t play rough, stop him jumping, don’t make a fuss when you’ve been away and never, ever hit him. Some of it makes sense as you’re going to ruin a lovely friendship with the postman if 30kg’s of in-flight dog t-bones him at a full gallop. But my Grandad’s dog lived off scraps from the dinner table, and was simply disciplined by a size 10 mining boot up the fundament.

I don’t remember taking him to the dog psychologist or finding my granddad hand wringing by the suggestion he may have created an environment for ‘early onset separation anxiety’. And if the new media doesn’t get you with its’ do good forums and virtual hippy hounds, then the big square tube offers up ‘Dog Borstal’ and ‘The Dog Whisperer“. Closest my Mum’s dad ever got to that was “Oi, leave that alone tha cheeky bugger!” BOOT/YELP “Now, get in tha bloody kennel you scabby sod”

The problem is pets – and especially dogs – sometimes seem to offer a kind of child substitute. They are treated like little humans and so anthropomorphically laden with child like emotions. And while dogs view the world as a simple mix of other dogs, and things that are probably just funny shaped dogs, they themselves need to be characterised as a widdle of simple mental levers topped off by a waggy tail.

Once you realise they’re greedy, opportunistic food obsessed quadrapeds accesorised by the full set of soulful eyes, wet snout and flappy ears – all encased in the kind of smell which suggests a sprout convention setting up in your garden, you’re ready to take on the mantle of pack leader. Almost. Except for the sleeping bit. You see puppies sleep whenever they’re not eating their food, eating your furniture or giving you the “not me pal, you must have fed the other fella” look. But once you want to get some of that zzz action, then they’re wide awake and wondering noisily why you’ve abandoned them.

It starts with a bark, then a whine, then a noise suggesting the pup is painfully performing a solo Heimlich manoeuvre. You’ve not really lived until that’s been going on most of the night. One hour Friday night, two hours Saturday night including a 2am emergency wee session, and about the same on Sunday convinced us that maybe the controlled crying technique we’d tried doesn’t work for puppies. I’d tried almost everything else, bit of comforting, stern words, scooby snacks and mildly abrasing my forehead against a passing wall. None of it was working and he was just getting worse.

Carol took her turn and returned to the sound of doggy silence. Only in the morning did I discover she’d lost patience and metered out some swift justice with the rolled up newspaper. The way we were feeling, it’s a good job there wasn’t a gun in the house. I remember thinking “I’m really too old for this deja-vu baby experience, and I’m betting you wouldn’t get this shit with a rabbit“. But we’re through it now* using the two big guns of dog ownership – tough love and food bribery.

He’s not going to be a puppy much longer, certainly if you consider that on size grounds alone. Murf is quite a bright cookie (bit of a worry for me, I was quite enjoying the not dumbest family member status) although he is the world’s slowest retriever. He’ll fetch stuff alright but it might be an hour later. Or the next day. So we’ve given up on all the do gooding advice, and going with let the puppy be a puppy. And if he’s really naughty, then fetch me the Sunday Times with all the supplements.

How do I know so much? Well I just made it up, and fully expect to have my own prime time TV series by the years’ end. Working title is “For F*cks sake, stop mincing about and just boot it up the arse”

* Please by writing this, let IT BE TRUE.

A simile long on description and short on ambiguity. But today, I must add the rider – wetter. Three years ago, the government were granting extraction licenses, by the hundred, to ensure the water companies could honour their dividend promises. And in that irritating pious way of theirs, then telling the rest of us to throw the hosepipe away as global warming was here to stay. And so it is, but the meteorological effects are somewhat different to advertised. if the last two summers’ set any sort of precedent.

And there is a certain irony that the same volume of poorly planned housing was contributing to parched aquifers are now being desperately sandbagged, as the greedy stupidity of building on flood plains is lapping against the public conscience. As a trivial aside, it also makes for bloody awful mountain biking as a bunch of 24 hour walking races have graphically demonstrated this year.

Today we have too much water in the ground, and a surfeit on top as well. 50mm of fast rain finds no space in the geological inn, and instead squats in river form on what used to be roads. With typical British planning, half the population refuses to leave the house, while a significant proportion of the remainder are washed downriver. Not me though, because – in line with a history of compensating a lack of talent with expensive equipment – the on roader of some softness was delivered in the middle of a period of extreme wet. I like to categorise this never ending rain using the simple term “summer”

Which somewhat scuppered my plans of a detailed inspection, focussing on Internet here-say of potentially explosive parts. Instead a mechanically inclined friend braved the weather to pull, push and prod various parts while I made him a nice cup of tea. Because, clearly what he needed right then was a bit more liquid. I could have done with a proper drink tho, as we transferred a suitcase of electronic cash to a bloke I’ve never met.

We celebrated our own personal credit crunch by taking an old fashioned drive in the country. Which was by this time essentially underwater with steams of hill washed clay accelerating down any and every back road. I engaged 4WD, gripped the steering wheel tightly, and made sail for some unmapped region of Herefordshire tracks and abandoned tarmac. When the car is as wide as the road and the edges even higher, you know this is the fated time to meet 40 feet of lost lorry coming the other way. But the X-Trail ignored my rubbishness and ploughed up muddy steeps, surfed through sill height water, and splashed gloriously through fords edged by abandoned cars.

I’d have been troubled significantly in the Honda. Especially if I’d wanted to sell it any time soon. Still that’s old news, the family has dismissed the loyal old retainer citing more space, bigger windows, easily scratched plastics (“Hey Dad, I’ve signed my name“) and the transient joy of the new. Even the pup loves it – no really I took his territory marking to signify his pleasure at yet another place he can piss with wild abandon.

Tomorrow I’m affixing a tow rope and a sign offering a five pound tow out service. Then for a laugh, I’m going to lobby my MP for a hosepipe ban.

I’m not really a man’s man when it comes to anything automotive. Much as I’d savour the opportunity to homologate a valve flange deep in the bowls of an oily engine, the reality is that the wielding of proper tools must be left to those comfortable with boiler suits, imperial measurements, and the ability to nod sagely at difficult times.

So I’m not much troubled by cars, aeroplanes, boats and the like as long as they work. I feel that most strongly when engines meet wings and spend much of the journey clutching the arm rest in terror. Once, a kindly older gentlemen – seated next to my twitching and blubbing form – explained that a fear of flying is irrational as air travel was safer than crossing the road. My counter argument, delivered through clenched teeth, was that flying really didn’t scare me at all, it was plunging vertically into the ground while encased in a tumbling fireball that put me off my in-flight sandwich.

You way mistake this for cowardice. But you’d be wrong, I am the only sane voice amongst a bunch of lunatics and, when the World Dictatorship Committee finally sits, anyone not afraid of death by extreme squashing shall be sent to the quacks to have their imagination glands checked for blockages.

And so to my car buying strategy. Because of my entirely reasonable aversion to sales people and assorted hangers on apparently interested in wheeled depreciation, my approach has been Internet research* followed by a swift test drive, some rubbish negotiation and the parting of me from a vast wodge of cash.

This time it’s going to be different. The Mighty Honda asks nothing more than black oil to be pumped in at one end, and a quarterly maintenance regime offered by a man owning nothing more than a soapy bucket. Sure, every year I get to witness the Service Centre practice licensed theft, but they do at least clean it properly. This is akin to having your house broken into, and the burglars doing the washing up on he way out.

My plan was to keep it until the built in obsolesce worried away at that valve flange and then again take up the cudgel of car ownership using nothing more than a browser and a crate of decent beer. The pup has changed all that. It seems we can take the dog, the kids and some luggage in Carol’s car. Just not at the same time. This could make future holidays a bit of a bugger.

Unless we don’t take the kids or spend the price of a Honda service on some rat infested chicken run to board the dog. We tried Murphy in my car but he already occupies an entire footwell, and is not best pleased to be sniffing the children’s feet while occasionally taking a errant size five trainer to the snozzle.

And there’s something else. My 41st birthday has brought on a worrying rural Ferrari fetish. After watching all manner of grunty machinery bringing in the harvest, I feel the time has come to scoot around in something with a ride height similar to a proper tractor. And that my faithful friends is essentially the twisted logic to buy the Tonka toy you see up there.

I did try to shelve my hatred of shiny suits and crowded forecourts, but when the man’s derisory offer for the just-3-hour-cleaned Honda fell well short of the sticker price optimistically displayed on the X-Trail we tried, I reverted to type, typing and beer.

Which is how I ended up in a strange conversation with a bloke in a Portacabin who sells cars that he doesn’t own and never sees. This probably tells us something important about the future of the second hand car industry, but I don’t care as it told me that we could bring the boxy truck home for FOUR GRAND LESS than Mr Checked Trousers promised me was the lowest price on the planet.

Okay it’s missing some toys and is six months older but once he’d answered my question re: does it go when you put diesel in it in the affirmative, I was pretty much sold. The Honda of Never Diminishing Mightiness may end up on eBay which sounds like a properly silly way to sell a car. Failing that, another nice man I’ve never met may well sink into it’s comfortable seats and feel the power of the precision elbow patches.

I have to say though that my life currently feels like it’s a small boat in a big river, and I’m really not in control of the rapidly changing options and decisions. That’s probably quite important too, and to make sure I think about it properly, I’d better go and open the cognitive juice.

* because, of course, hardly ANYONE on the misinformation super rantway is biased, bitter, venting or clinically sane.

Dribbling contentedly on my foot is Murphy. After a brief – but forceful – explanation of exactly how democracy works in our family, it was agreed the black hound of lower hell should go by the name of a Guiness wanabee. And there are good reasons for this, the best of which is my refusal to shout “Ziggy, STOP” if and when the toothy pup starts chewing on someone else’s car tyre.

Such an action is clearly contravening the RULES. This document has a series of non negotiable behavioral patterns as laid down by the pack leader. So for the first time in my married life, there is something organic lower down the hierarchical chain than yours truly. Before Murph arrived, that was a rank allocated to a jar of sandwich pickle.

A brief immersion into the four closely written sides of A4 which constitute the rules will demand said dog shall not:

– Wee, Poo or Barf in any location other than within 10 feet of the compost bin
– Eat the Cat Food, the Cat, the furniture, the kids toys or anything chewy, rubbery and previously representing a mountain bike tyre
– Whine, howl, whimper or bark when shut in the cage*
– Fall headlong into the pond while chasing spiders.

This is merely a summary and once the dog has learned to read, I fully expect them to be followed in full. Until then, and based on experiences so far, almost all of these rules are merely guidelines to be ignored in the spirit of puppidom. So far, I’ve fetched the dog out of the pond, removed a tyre from its’ teeth and given it a stern talking to whenever ‘squatting’ and ‘indoors’ are brought together in a single smelly sentence.

This afternoon I have promised to paint a door. This task is made somewhat harder since Murphy – respecting my status as pack leader – follows me everywhere. It is likely I shall be phoning the emergency vet later this evening to enquire on the correct procedure which follows emulsioning a Labrador.

Cute tho isn’t he? And doesn’t the bugger bloody well know it.

* Although ten years being sort of responsible for children has equipped me with the appropriate tool here. It’s like politicans and whinging kids, if you ignore them long enough, the noise falls back to a background hum.

Scotland has many qualities. The sense of wilderness, the rugged beauty of the mountains, the endlessness of stunning landscapes and some pretty wild riding. Of course, this must be tempered with single digit summer temperatures, moistness from the ground up and the sky down, and a trillion midges hell bent on sucking you dry.

On balance though, a fantastic country to ride bicycles in, as a few chosen photos full of heroism and downright British grit will soon ascertain. However, that’s for later because the photo at the top of this post is clearly lacking anything within chucking distance of mountain bikes, except perhaps for noting that we’ve acquired a singletrack dog.

Large paws, low centre of gravity, short paw-base and excellent additional rear facing steering appendage*. It’s an odd story – today I was still meant to be in Scotland but five days hard riding, dubious ongoing weather and a wrenching missing of the family saw me spend seven hours heading south west last night.

Which led to an apathetic carpet treading furniture buying mission turning into a full on “I tell you what, let’s get a dog” event through a set of coincidences about as likely as finding your sister was also in fact your mother, your aunt and a small bag of aniseed balls.

The rambling antique furniture barn was only gained via a suspension wrecking drive and guarded by a friendly, slobbering Labrador. We quickly discovered that our financial radar was seriously awry because the cheapest thing on offer seemed to cost about the same as a new car. I don’t know what Queen Anne did for the furniture trade, but they’ve repaid her by placing discreet price tags that brought on an involuntary “F*ck ME!”.

I didn’t even dare look at the larger items because I shall never ever be able to part with that much money for something that doesn’t come with about 4 acres of land. Anyway, distraction was adequately provided by a friendly puppy attempting to chew about 15k’s worth of table. He seemed very happy to see us and we discovered he was the last of a litter of 12 and had been returned by a distraught family with a dog allergy.

So with 11 puppies already sold and this one surplus to requirements, it seemed somehow fated that we’d end up spending two hours fetching its’ nose out of – well – everything and trying to find reasons no to add four more legs to the family.

We failed. So meet Murphy. Or Ziggy. Or possibly Max. Although looking at the size of those paws, I’m thinking Beelzebub may be more appropriate

* Those in the know call this a ‘tail‘. To be it looks like a rudder.

Aside from the abruptly terminated squeals of those too slow movers deep in the food chain, not much disturbs the peace and quiet of plants growing round here. Except at harvest time, when all manner of noisy machinery stalks the landscape pulling, shredding, lifting, slicing and dicing the crop.

We’ve become accustomed to the rhythmic thump of the bonkers potato grabber, and the whining of heavily overloaded tractors. But tonight, the rapeseed was given a proper mowing by a man piloting a frankly terrifying big, green threshing machine.

Although he appeared fully in control of the behemoth, I did worry that a slight steering miscalculation would see him harvest the Mighty Honda. In fact, both of them and the kids who’d stationed themselves on the car roof for a better view.

When we finally get a lawn, I might ask him for a mates’ rate haircut of our grass.

Not mains gas of course as that would be far too a) easy and b) cheap. At some point in the unspecified future, a man either qualified to mess about with lethal gases, or the proud owner of the Queen’s favourite mutt shall connect Flange ‘B’ to Gusset ‘F’, and the bloody enormous cooker shall be ready for use.

For Carol this means the ability to feed the family using all manner of interesting flames – some confined to the oven, others threatening eyebrow removal up top. For me, it’ll provide the perfect partner for Sunday fryups built around a signature dish of eggy soldiers. I’m not much for cooking but the ‘external thermally coupled griddle with afterburner thrust” is essentially an indoor BBQ, and no real man can resist that.

Until then we were resigned to all weather BBQ’ing augmented by any fine delicacies than can be fried by microwave. But saved we were* by our insanely kind sellers who still live next door, and happened to have a cooker going spare.

This helped the ease the moving trauma which began at an unholy 7:30 this morning, and included such highlights as yours truly being felled by a hail of coat hangers, the terrifying loss of all our booze, and the broken inevitably of two large men being overrun by a large wardrobe.

Still they’ll probably be fine. Spinally compressed and a bit shorter, but basically fine. They build them different out here and I’ll leave you with an example of exactly how different that can be.

Various builders, electricians and random interlopers have been glassy eyed confused on my retelling of how we saw a bridally bedecked tractor heading off to Church this morning. Everyone thought this was strange, me because it’s a TRACTOR for God’s sake, and everyone else not understanding why I should find this amusing.

And when they had all gone, I walked up the hill and spent ten minutes in the viewing company of absolutely bugger all. It may not be for everyone, but here and now it feels bloody fantastic.

* No ariel. No TV. Been practicing my Yoda method acting through repeated viewings.