Snoopy Snippets ~ 9 ~

Confident that I wouldn’t lose Snoopy, after a week or two of the trial described in the last chapter, I took him to the beach, and let him off the lead as soon as we were well clear of the car park. I’d planned our walk to coincide with low tide, to make walking on the sand easier for us both. That proved unnecessary – as least for Snoopy, who seemed equally happy walking on both soft and firm sand. However, he was very unsure about the ocean. After being caught – if only to the extent of getting wet legs and belly – by a couple of little waves, he gave it a wide berth.

Published 1st August 2024 By Tony Barnett
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On the outward walk, Snoopy kept close to me, and I had no need for the treats in my pocket. Despite showing no signs of tiredness, after 15 minutes he decided that we’d walked far enough. I duly turned round. On the return walk, Snoopy was more adventurous, and the treats were put to frequent, successful use. We encountered many dogs – all bigger than Snoopy, and without fail he barked furiously at every one of them… until they came close enough to prove their friendliness. We spent only 35 minutes on the beach and, given Snoopy’s aversion to the ocean, I was left wondering if the experiment was worth repeating.

Snoopy regularly entered my shower after I’d vacated it, to lick the water remaining on the tiles. However, having regard to his dislike of getting wet, I found it hard to understand his apparent desire to join me in the shower while the water was running. He would wait until my back was turned before pushing the inward-opening glass door. Perhaps, when I think it’s time for him to have another bath, I should encourage him to venture further.

Regular readers of this column may recall Snoopy’s discovery that the skirt on my bed was padded with the same stuffing as his day bed, and he had similarly disembowelled it. He hadn’t touched it for many months, and usually slept when I was out, for four hours or even longer, so I’d been considering replacing it. Fortunately I hadn’t acted on that intention since, returning from shopping in late March, after an absence of only 1½ hours, I found my bedroom floor covered with white fluff. Snoopy was then nine months old; how much longer before he lost his destructive compulsion?

As with my bed skirt, Snoopy’s second day bed had remained untouched for a long time. Then a few small pieces of white fluff started to appear. I examined its base, but it was unbroken. Eventually I found a small hole in its wall, evidently his means of access to the apparently irresistible stuffing. For want of a more common means of deterrent, I poked some hot English mustard into the hole. As I might have guessed, Snoopy taunted me by manifesting unconventional taste: he relished it.

One evening, friends whom Snoopy hadn’t previously met, came to dinner. I suggested that, in order to enjoy their preprandial drinks unmolested, they should both sit on one lounge, and Snoopy would sit with me on the other. Some hope! I thought that, in an earlier chapter, I’d exhausted my vocabulary in describing Snoopy’s energy, but that evening he gave it a new meaning. My unfamiliar guests evidently deserved more attention than I did, and he wouldn’t leave them alone. When he leapt onto David’s lap, spilling his red wine all over Lindy’s clothes, I shut him outside to calm down. Needless to say, that had the opposite effect.

However, Snoopy redeemed himself the following night. It was raining, so he apparently didn’t go outside before I went to bed at about 10pm. He woke me at 1.30am, clearly needing to relieve himself. By then the rain was torrential, and I knew from past experience, previously recorded, there was no way I could expect Snoopy to pass through the water that was cascading from the gutter immediately outside the back door. So I donned some old shoes, grabbed an umbrella, and led him into the front garden under its protection. But this time the ground was evidently too soggy under foot. So I put an old towel on the laundry floor and urged him to pee on it. No way. I then noticed that a bag of training pads, which Snoopy had treated as toys when a young puppy, was still in the laundry. I put one on the floor and invited Snoopy to use it for its intended purpose for once. To the relief of us both, he duly obliged, almost flooding the pad.

When I returned to bed, Snoopy was very reluctant to return to his – probably disconcerted by the sound of the heavy rain on the roof, as once before. The only way I had any hope of going back to sleep was again to surrender. Snoopy crawled under the duvet, and didn’t emerge until I was in the shower after 8am. Had my two capitulations set a precedent for each time we had a nocturnal deluge?

 

Lest any regular reader of this series thinks that Chapter 8 has been missed, it was in fact that in the July issue, for some mysterious reason wrongly numbered 7. (The real Chapter 7 appeared in the June issue.)

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