By

Craig Ennew

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Six: All Pets are Off

This week: Craig wonders how the four-legged members of Team Ennew will cope.

My wife, The Boy and I aren’t the only bodies migrating from Salisbury to West Lulworth. Our four-legged friends are too. In the grand scheme of things, they’re low in the pecking order (although technically only one of them pecks). However, the departure date, while still unspecified, draws near: perhaps weeks away now, rather than months. It is time to contemplate the motley crew of reprobates, psychopaths and degenerates that are our pets.

Arguably, the least of our concerns is Reggie the Tortoise. As with other members of our menagerie (and I count myself among this league), Reggie the Tortoise has been acquired by circumstance. Under the previous guardianship of my wife’s cousin, this creature’s proclivity to violence had been such that removal from his siblings was a matter of urgency. Given that one of those siblings was called Ronnie, we should have seen the red flag.

Meet cute: When Reggie met Percy

His jaws will start snapping and jet packs fire at full thrust

As it stands, Reggie remains the most aggressive tortoise I’ve ever met – and I’ve met a few. Come Summer, as soon as he detects the exposed toe of someone basking down the far end of the garden, his jaws will start snapping and jet packs fire at full thrust. Sitting fifty yards away on your deckchair, you slowly sip your Pinot Grigio thinking, ‘He’s a tortoise: I have ages to lift my feet out of the way before he inches his way over here.’ But you’d be a fool. The chippy little bugger moves like Usain Bolt with a shell on his back, and he bites twice as hard. I’m not sure if he thinks said toe is a fellow tortoise’s head or a light snack – either way, it’s fairly alarming for the undiscerning sunbather.

Testudinally-speaking, Reggie the Tortoise is also a phenomenal escape artist. A brick wall enclosing our garden poses no obstacle: he slips beneath the iron gate with agile ease. Neighbours find him sauntering down their own garden path days later without a care in the world. We’ve now had to seal off that avenue and we’ve shut down all other possible exits. Short of hiring a motorbike and vaulting the perimeters like Steve McQueen in Escape to Victory, the hard-shelled Houdini is going nowhere from now on. Besides, as the nights close in, he is fast-approaching hibernation time. As we contemplate our move to Lulworth, we’ll tuck him into a little straw-packed box and send him into a longer Winter sleep. Reggie will awaken around April, by which time, hopefully, we can show the little fella the newly-restored Shack in all its glory, along with fresh sets of toes to worry.

Our second reprobate is Percy the Cat. Perce was acquired eight years ago from friends who were moving to New Zealand. As a sprightly three-year-old, he presented as the outdoors-type: he certainly didn’t take kindly to an initial three-week quarantine in Salisbury during the hottest heatwave in twelve years. Consequently, foreshadowing the exploits of Reggie, Perce made a successful bid for escape too. Finding, on that first sultry evening, the only window in the house that we’d left ajar, he was out like a rocket. It took a six-pack of tuna, a steel cage, and a cat-lady as mad as a sack of badgers to lure him back to the fold over two weeks later. Only when we trusted him to venture out alone once more did we get the full measure of this feisty feline’s thirst for street brawls. Within a month, he’d been down the vets twice with multiple injuries, including a wound that almost saw him change gender. The best part of a decade on, and he’s a lot more domesticated in his dotage. His hunger for a good scrap is undiminished, though; indeed, it is not uncommon for my wife and I to be woken by caterwauling in the street below our bedroom window at 3 AM- a noise I can only compare to Cilla Black trying to impersonate Adele whilst riding a humpbacked whale. Percy the Cat remains satisfied with his urban setting but, come the move, he too will have to acclimatise to country life and new adversaries. And we haven’t even thought about what we’ll do with him while the building work is underway.

Finally, we have the biggest problem of all: Bobby the Dog. The Bobster has never been problematic in the way that his fellow quadrupeds have. A placid sort of chap, he’s always happy to loiter in the shadow of whoever is standing nearest the fridge. As a rescue-centre dog, his age was determined as being “about nine or ten” when we took him on. We think they were probably being vague on account of him being beyond insurance age – hence astronomical vets’ bills.

Being a chocolate lab in the last throes of your life isn’t much fun. Everything is either on its way out or has given up the ghost completely. You can’t see, you’re stone deaf and you stink to high heaven. Bobby’s back legs buckle so badly beneath his arse, it’s like a big sack of cookie dough being propped up by matchsticks. His grace is his fully- functioning olfactory system which, in turn, continues to fuel his ceaseless desire for food.

To be fair, we never expected Bobby the Dog to make it this far. Each morning, one of us that goes down first to make a cup of tea. We’ll tentatively bend over him and check whether he’s still breathing. The gentle rise and fall of his various lumps and bumps or – if you’re lucky – the laconic cock of an eye indicate that there is life, Jim, but not as we know it. And then there’s the chronic incontinence. I can only thank God that we made the decision to get a stone floor when we had the new kitchen done, and that one of my wife’s friends seems to have a limitless stock of antiseptic wet-wipes. That said, I’ll never get back the ten minutes we spent in Tile King deliberating the colour of the grouting. I think we’ll plump for dog-piss yellow, darling…

Knackered: Bobby the Dog with The Boy

Now, though, we must think through the logistics of him moving house with us – initially into rental property then finally to The Shack. And The Shack itself poses challenges – steep steps from the roadside bearing down at an alarming gradient. The old bag of wind could never manage them. A few of us might be able to carry him down, but at what cost? One thing’s for sure – he would never make it back outside the grounds of that property again. No clifftop walk along the coast path for Bobby the Dog – that adventure is for Bobby the Dog, Mark 2, whatever shape or form he, she or it might take.

I know. There, but for the grace of God, go all of us. Maybe Bobby the Dog, like Percy and Reggie, should be part of our exciting journey to Lulworth too. Maybe some day I’ll find someone writing me off and telling me that the only way I will ever have any hope of hauling my sorry arse out of The Shack will be when it’s in a coffin. It’s time I was a kinder person.

©Craig Ennew 2024

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