I guess my life with dogs started when I was about 13 years
old. We’d just moved to a Glasgow overspill housing scheme and we got a puppy
from a neighbour, a small bundle of brown and white fluff. My brother (Robert) and I called her Patche (don’t know where
the ‘e’ came from but I suppose it was because our father watched western shows
on TV and we mistakenly thought we’d call her after the Apache Indians). Anyway,
Patche had a ‘lovely’ life running off to the nearby farm and chasing the
farmer’s cows and sheep (a bad move because like today, farmers can shoot dogs who
are worrying their animals), catching burglars and generally having a nice life.
Unfortunately, when Patche was about 5 years old, she followed me one night when I was
going off to a football match. I didn’t notice her until I’d
walked about a mile from the house and as I was going to meet my prospective new father-in-law,
I told her rather sternly to ‘go home’. She never did and I have regretted not
having taken her back to this day. Poor Patche – whatever happened to her? My brother has never forgiven me to this day.
Fast forward 30 odd years without dogs in my life and I
moved to France to be with an ex-girlfriend who had decided she wanted me back
in her life. The family consisted of Julie and her two kids, Guy (5) and Kitty
(3) and Shadow – a 1 year old mixed breed mutt, so called because being all
black, when he peered through the windows or ran about at night, he looked like
a shadow.
I guess Shadow was in the process of becoming the alpha male of the family
but he bore no grudges when I moved in and immediately took to me despite the
fact that I was travelling a lot with my job then and only saw him at weekends.
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| The wonderful Shadow |
Shadow and I became inseparable. He followed me everywhere,
even accompanying me to the local bars and restaurants where all the locals knew him as a
perfectly behaved dog who would patiently sit under the tables waiting for a
scrap of hamburger or a bit of ham. And then we’d go home to our house in the foothills
of the Alps where he’d chase rabbits and run away from wild boars.
Shadow had a wonderful life but was obviously a breed which
suffered from hip problems and sure enough when he was about 14 years old, his
back legs deteriorated and we had to ‘let him go’. To me, it was a truly
traumatic time which I tried to capture in a blog I wrote at the time. You can
read it here.......
I told my girlfriend, soon to
become my wife, that I needed time to get over Shadow’s death but true to form,
she went off to lunch one day and reappeared with the most gorgeous little
puppy. Of course, she knew that despite still grieving for Shadow, once I set
eyes on this little bundle of fluff I would be smitten and so it turned out, but
what to call her? Kitty, my step-daughter wanted to name her Khaleesi after
some character in the TV show Game of Thrones but having watched one
particularly gruesome episode, I wasn’t convinced and so we named her Elsa
after the lioness in the film Born Free.
Like Shadow, Elsa was ‘the
perfect dog’, beautifully behaved, a wonderful temperament, faithfully
following me around the fields and terraces and just like Shadow, with impeccable
manners in the bars and restaurants. By this time, I was on the verge of
retirement so Elsa and I spent virtually 24 hours a day in each other’s
company. She was a wonderful companion, almost a reincarnation of the dearly
loved Shadow.
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| Little Elsa |
When Elsa was about 2 years old,
I decided to move to Spain. A lengthy journey ensued with Elsa stretched out on
the back seat of the car, patiently looking forward to the nightly stops in ‘dog
friendly’ hotels. For a dog who spent all day, every day in the fields and
terraces of the foothills of the Alps, it couldn't have been a pleasant journey,
particularly as Spain decided to have its hottest summer for 30 years with the
temperature reaching 43 degrees! Worse, my new home was not available for a
month so we had to ‘exist’ in a small, airless apartment, the saving grace being that
the beach, which Elsa loved, was but a minute’s walk away.
We got through that period by
going for morning swims and chasing birds but it couldn’t have been pleasant
for her cooped up in a tiny flat when she’d been used to roaming at will. I
guess she took her revenge by having her first ‘wee’ of the morning, every
morning, on the immaculate lawn at the front of the apartment block which
rapidly turned a bright yellow and then died!
The month past incredibly slowly
in the searing heat of the Spanish summer but eventually it was time to move
into our new home – and that’s when we met Django.
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