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Updated
7th December 2021 Christmas
2021 is our first Christmas without Skipper since 2006, and already,
with three weeks to go, I'm feeling heavy-hearted, and I know Wendy is
too. He was larger than life, he dominated our lives, he was our soul
mate, and without being aware of it, he was a therapy dog, because he
made our lives, and our little world, that much better. It's been hard
coming home and not having him waiting for us. It's been hard not
taking him for walks, not getting him to eat his dinner, not looking after
him, not being able to touch him... and it won't get any better. We've
more or less decided we won't be having another dog - having lost our
beloved Holly at the age of eight to cancer, and now Skipper, earlier
this year at the age of fifteen years and one day, we think it will be
too painful for us to lose another family member. We will be raising a
glass to our two "absent friends" on Christmas day, and we love looking
at pictures of the two of them as they crop up on Facebook Memories.
That's it. Never forgotten, always loved, that's all there is to say...
Best
friend, companion, soulmate...
I
always wanted a dog. My first memory of wanting a dog was after reading
Enid Blyton's The Rockingdown Mystery, and falling in love with (1)
Diana and (2) Loony the madcap spaniel. I didn't know it at the time
but Enid was a confirmed dog lover too. But Mum said no. She said that
I was too busy with my schoolwork, and that I wouldn't have time to
look after a dog, and she certainly didn't have time! If I'm painting a
picture of a not-very-nice Mother, nothing could be further from the
truth. Mum was a brilliant, loving mum, who loved dogs (see the photo
in the right-hand column) and I lived an idyllic life,
being brought up in a medium-sized village at the foot of the
Cotswolds, in a three-bedroomed villa from the front bedroom of which
we could see Cooper's Hill, the hill down which they roll the cheeses
on Whit Monday. Loony wasn't my first experience of dogs, real or as
characters in children's books. My Uncle John worked part-time in the
public house down the road in Hucclecote, and often brought Rego home
with him at lunch time, to give him a mid-day walk. Rego was a pub dog
- an enormous Alsatian, and I adored him. When I was between two and
three years old, I would play with him, sitting under my Gran's dining
room table, stroking him, cuddling him, and
generally making a fuss of him. That friendship with Rego went on for
several
years, and as it progressed I became more and more respectful of him
and what he was - a guard dog. I never took him for a walk on
my
own but often walked back down to the pub with Uncle John when he
returned Rego to the pub premises. I wanted a dog of my own from around
the age of eight, but it was not to be. Then, in April 1964, I met
Wendy, the girl who would become my wife in
just under two years' time.
We
worked together in the public library in Stevenage New Town, and I met
her on my first day in April 1964 when she, like all of us junior
library assistants, mucked in to get the previous day's returned books
back on
the bookshelves in their proper places. Fiction was arranged
alphabetically, non-fiction was arranged according to the Dewey Decimal
classification system, a fairly daft system that was used by just about
every public library at the time (and probably still is). After helping
with the shelving,
Wendy would go back upstairs to her specialist job of matching readers'
obscure requests with stocks in the inter-library lending scheme. Her
job was
to search various catalogues and indices to first identify the book and
then to communicate with other libraries in the scheme (sometimes in
Hertfordshire, mostly in other counties and even in university and
specialist libraries) and arrange for copies of these rare books to be
sent on loan for our readers to borrow. It was a very important job,
and I didn't see much of her until much later in the year, in October
it was, when she
came looking for me in the reference library, where I was working on
that day. One of the other female library assistants was with her, and
she
did the talking. Wendy was very shy (as was I) and she hung back while
the
others did the talking.
"Wendy
was followed home off the bus last night. She was a bit scared. We
wondered if you would take her home on the bus tonight and see she gets
home
safely?" This from Angela, Wendy's best friend at the library.
Of
course I agreed readily. It was nice to be asked, and Wendy, although
only just sixteen years old at the time, and eighteen months younger
than me, who looked as if she should still be at school, was very
pretty, with a beautiful smile. Although she was younger than
me, I had always thought of myself as much older, I don't
know why. Now, looking back, I can remember feeling quite excited to be
escorting her home on the bus, and then walking her to her front door.
In those days, Monday-Thursday the
library stayed open till eight o'clock, and I lived less than a mile
from where she lived, and also we both got off the bus at the same stop
-
the Hyde shopping precinct, (where I lived). I had never ever noticed
her getting off the bus where I did, but of course she must have.
Anyway, we sat together on the bus, chatting, and at around 8:30pm we
got off the bus and walked up Hydean Way to Chertsey Rise, where Wendy
lived. I saw her to her door and on impulse, asked if she would like to
go for a walk Sunday afternoon - she said yes. I think it was then,
when she said "yes" that I knew that she was "the one"...
I
duly walked up Hydean Way to meet her, at 2:30pm, as arranged, the
following Sunday, and
there she was, being dragged along Chertsey Rise towards the junction
at the top of the hill, by an enormous brown dog. He was very big and
very powerful, and it was all she could do to hold onto him. It was a
windy day,
but sunny and still warm that September. She shouted something that I
didn't catch, and I hurried across the road to where she stood,
struggling to hold this huge dog. "I told you to wait for me to come to
you," she said anxiously. "He doesn't like strangers!" But she needn't
have worried. Butch (pictured above) was the name of Wendy's dog - he
was a first cross
between an Alsatian and a boxer, and he loved me right from the moment
we first met. I asked if I could hold him on the lead, and being very
strong after
all
those years of rowing at school, I was able to hold him much easier
than this small slip of a girl. The bond between Wendy and Butch was
obvious for all to see. She adored him, and lived for looking after
him. He was the most important individual in her life. It turned out we
were both the younger siblings of two-parent, two children households,
though I didn't meet her family until a few days later. That Sunday we
went for a two-hour walk with Butch through Aston and Benington and
back
to Wendy's home in Chertsey Rise. "I'll see you tomorrow at work," I
said as we parted, and then realised that without knowing it, we had
been holding hands for the last half hour of our first walk together.
Seventeen months later, in May 1966, we were married, and Butch was the
first of six dogs we have looked after and loved in our 55 years of
marriage (as of this year). I never had the Cocker Spaniel I wanted,
but
the dogs we've shared our
homes with have all been brilliant. We loved them all, still do, of
course, but our final two doggies have brought us the most
joy and a hefty measure of heartache and anxiety at the same time. In
the following paragraphs you'll learn more about Butch, Chang, Buster,
Nipper, Holly (our
only girl doggy) and Skipper, and you'll also learn why Skipper and
Holly were very, very special dogs. Because he managed to reach his
fifteenth birthday, Skipper holds a very special place in our hearts -
we lost Holly to lymphoma at the age of eight, and I still talk to her
every day, I read my bedtime book (silently, of course) to her at
bedtime,
she's in the form of a soft toy of a border collie puppy. I won't ever
forget her, and like to think that she has gone on to a different,
higher plane of existence, and has even moved on to be our guardian
angel.
Wendy
and I were married on 21st May 1966 in St. Mary's Church
Shephall,
and after living in
Wendy's parents' house for
six months our application for a house of our own with Stevenage
Development Coroporation was approved and we moved into Warren Avenue
on the Chells estate when Wendy was expecting our first child, and we
made a new home for
Butch. Martin was born the following year, in April, and later that
year his first word was "Goggy", which was his way of saying "Doggy".
Butch lived to a good age; he loved a game of "pully bitey growlers" as
we called it, a game played with socks (sometimes they would be socks
we needed to wear and it wasn't really a game, but a vain attempt to
get your socks back), and when he
passed away, we missed him terribly. Wendy's boss at work bred Shih
Tzus, and asked us to look after a puppy (not one of hers, but one that
had come to her when the people who were due
to have him backed out). This would be, Joyce told us, "just until I
can
find him a new home." We named him Chang, or rather I named him Chang,
and he was adorable. Not what we wanted, but adorable nevertheless, and
full of character. Of course, Joyce had conned us into looking after
Chang for a while because she believed we needed another dog, and she
never actually intended finding another home for him.
Naturally, she was right and we fell in love with Chang the day we
collected him from her house. But we were determined to get another,
larger puppy, and Wendy and Martin, who was by now, I think, seven
years
old, went to the local Blue Cross Kennels near Royston one Saturday
morning, where a
litter of puppies
who had been separated from their mother at six weeks were being looked
after. I was
working that Saturday morning, but when I got home at lunchtime, I
found
them with this quivering little wreck of a puppy.
Buster
turned out to be a Boxer cross, but no one knew what the other half of
the cross was. He screamed the house down the first night he was in our
home, so I suggested putting him into bed with Chang, and it worked.
They hit it off straight away and were inseparable (and quiet) from
that moment on.
We had many hilarious adventures with Buster and Chang, the latter
taking it into his head to squeeze through the fence and walk into next
door's kitchen and bark at our neighbour! Not many photos
of them, just this one of Chang, because in the early seventies,
photography was a very
expensive hobby, and I wasn't earning that much, despite being the
librarian at Hawker Siddeley Dynamics and then Records Officer at
British Aircraft Corporation. Within a year or so of me joining BAC,
both they and Hawker Siddeley merged to become part of the new British
Aerospace giant. Life was good even though we were poor. We had Martin,
we had our two little
dogs - Buster had grown up to become about the same size as a spaniel,
and there were plenty of nice walks when we moved back to Chertsey
Rise, although this time we were renting our own
three-bedroomed
house a few
yards away from where Wendy's parents and brother lived. Chang got into
the habit of picking fights with larger dogs, particularly Alsatians,
and then wandering off leaving Buster to sort things out. He was never
an aggressive dog, but if he thought his little brother was in danger,
he engaged in fights readily and had an amazing success rate of seeing
off his opponents, no matter what size they were. Like I said, they
were inseparable. Chang was a confirmed opera lover, and always ran
into the front room when we were listening to it on the radio or on the
record player. He would put his head on one side and sing along with
it. His absolute favourite song, though was "Lady Marmalade"!
Both
Chang and Buster lived to ripe old ages, although by the time he
passed away, a year or so after Buster, Chang was both deaf and mostly
blind. By this time we had moved
to a new estate at Bragbury End, near to the village of Knebworth, and
next to the Roger Harvey Garden Centre on the Hertford Road. By now I
was working at the Water Research Centre and we were wondering about
getting another dog. In 1991, when our family was complete, with second
son Christopher born in 1981 and daughter Samantha born in 1984
(although
we were still without a dog), I was made redundant from a very good job
with BAe
Defence Systems, and
we took the opportunity to move to Fakenham in Norfolk. We had taken
advantage of the Right to
Buy and were now in a position to move anywhere in the country, but
settled on Norfolk, hoping eventually to move nearer to the sea, having
enjoyed many annual holidays at seaside towns like Sheringham,
Hunstanton, Cromer and Wells-Next-The-Sea in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Settled
in Fakenham and with an excellent if low-paid job at Bernard Matthews
(the turkey man) we were now seriously thinking of getting another dog,
and
found a litter of border collie cross puppies in a village called
Topcroft on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. In a huge barn there
were twenty puppies from two different litters swarming
around.
Wendy
went into the barn and immediately one little pup came to her, and we
knew instantly that this was to be our next dog - Nipper. He put his
head on one side like the HMV dog, Nipper, and so that was my
suggestion for his name and it stuck. He had what looked like a
lightning strike on his head, as you can see in the photo above. The
people we bought him from (we like to think of it as paying for the
privilege of looking after him and taking him into our family) called
him Badger, because of his striking
markings, but to us he was always Nipper. Nipper was the most loving
dog we had had so far, and soon became a firm favourite with the whole
family. Again, not many photos of Nipper, because photography was still
so
expensive - buying a camera was bad enough, and you still had to fork
out for film,
which was not cheap (unlike today's photography, when you can take
brilliant photos
on a smart phone!). Today's generation won't understand any of this,
because of digital photography and smart phones, but believe me, I had
a series of decent cameras, and still struggled to afford film for
them! Before moving to Fakenham, I usually managed to save up enough
money for a couple of rolls
of film when we went on holiday, which was once a year, for a week at
the seaside on the east coast of Norfolk or Suffolk.
We
had many long years of fun with Nipper, but when his time came, we
realised that we had fallen in love with the sheer intelligence of the
border collie side of him, and we decided, in 2006, to have another dog
come to live with us, and this time it would be a full border collie.
In those days, pups for sale were to be found just about everywhere -
on notice boards, on for sale boards in supermarkets, even in the for
sale adverts in the local newspapers. We found the advert for Skipper
in the EDP (Eastern Daily Press) and went to the house where he lived,
in Briston, about five miles from Fakenham, in May of that year. The
lady of the house had two bitches running around in the back garden,
but no sign of the boy pup we'd come to see. She explained that the two
girls were a little rough with him, and tended to bully him, and she
put them away in a cage
before bringing out the boy, whom I had already decided to call
Skipper. As you can see from the picture at the top of this page, the
one where he's sitting on the paving slabs, he was utterly adorable,
with beautiful bright ginger markings and
we fell in love with him immediately. I played with his mum, Jade,
while Wendy and the lady of the house chatted about money, and
Skipper's lineage etc., and reluctantly, we went home and waited the
two weeks for him to reach eight weeks, then went to collect him.
Unlike
any other dog we've taken into our home, Skipper was in his element. He
stomped around our garden in Fakenham, declared himself entirely
satisfied with his new surroundings and his new family, and settled in,
perfectly happy to have come to live with us. His first task was to
reduce the height of all the shrubs in the garden to about six inches,
rose bushes included!
Apart from that, he was never destructive (Nipper had attempted to
destroy a kitchen cabinet, something we managed to discourage
him from doing by smearing Vic ointment along the bottom - he never did
it again, although he did eat
footwear if you left it within his reach). Within a few days
we
took Skipper to the vet for his first set of jabs, and Stefan, the vet,
told us
we had chosen a very special puppy. He couldn't have been more right.
Skipper was admired wherever we went. His beautiful markings were
spectacular - he was the most gorgeous puppy, and he eventually grew
into the most striking tricolour border collie we have ever
seen. Also, he turned out to be one of the biggest BCs anyone
had
ever seen! He was probably twice the size of the breed standard - a
magnificent specimen and loved by everyone he came into contact with.
In
September of that year, 2006, we finally had the opportunity to move to
Sheringham, and we
took it. Our new house is just five minutes from the playing field, six
or
seven minutes from the cliff walks, ten minutes from the world-famous
Beeston Bump, and fifteen minutes from the beach. Skipper was in his
element, and again, with more or less all of the neighbours and
residents of eastern Sheringham bringing their dogs to the playing
field and the cliff walks, and to trail over the bump for the
spectacular scenery, everyone got to know us and Skipper, everyone
admired and fell in love with him, and he lived the life of Riley. In
his early years there were scary moments, like when he wandered off the
cliff path over the edge whilst Wendy was out walking him and I was at
work. Her heart in her mouth, she rushed to the edge, looked over
anxiously and watched in horror as he walked up a narrow path and back
onto the cliff path as though nothing had happened. On another
occasion, he chased the train. The line ran along the bottom of the
playing field, and he loved to chase the train. One day he simply
disappeared into the distance. I jogged after him, pausing at the level
crossing to make sure he hadn't gone through the gate and onto the
line, and five minutes later I found him, sitting in the field that
surrounds Beeston church, waiting for me to catch up. It was a huge
game to him! Skipper also hated hang gliders, and these hateful people
always went out of their way to tease and taunt him by flying low near
him. One day he chased them from West Runton up to the top of Beeston
Bump, a distance of over a mile, which he covered in just a few
minutes. The hang glider "pilots" just laughed but it was really quite
dangerous because Skipper could quite easily have plunged over the edge
of the bump and into the sea or onto the rocks below. After that, if we
saw hang gliders coming from the east, we put Skipper on the lead until
they'd gone. The ones that come to Sheringham aren't particularly nice
people, I have to say.
During
these early years, Skipper broke one of his dew claws twice and had
expensive surgery to repair it, twice. Thereafter, it always grew back
crooked, like a scythe, and stuck out of his leg at right angles
instead of pointing downwards. We had to buy special leather bootees
for him to wear so that he didn't worry it. Also by this time we had
registered with the Sheringham vets, Miramar, run by Jane and Michaela,
two lovely ladies who inevitably fell in love with Skipper and helped
us to keep him healthy and fit for the best part of fifteen years. In
his later years, Skipper was prone to stomach infections - (we get
thousands of visitors to the unsightly and horrendous static caravan
parks that are dotted all the way along the AONB) - which
he inevitably
caught from one of the visiting dogs. But after a jab or two at the
vets, he always recovered, usually within a few hours. He would chase a
ball thrown from a ball thrower (what a brilliant invention they are!)
but he could never be bothered to bring it back. He never
thought about chasing rabbits or squirrels until Holly arrived.
When
Skipper was two, we thought it might be nice to get him a companion,
and started looking for a tricolour bitch puppy, eventually finding a
litter on a local farm. Holly came into our lives in 2008 and
immediately became top dog! She completely dominated Skipper, took his
toys away from him so that she could play with them, hovered around the
kitchen at dinner time to pounce on any dinner that Skipper left - she
polished hers off in a couple of minutes, Skipper always ate daintily
and slowly, savouring every morsel! Any soft toy bought for Skipper for
birthday or Christmas
was immediately confiscated and eviscerated by Holly, eyes first, then
the nose, and then the stuffing. Together they
would chase anything wild that moved - squirrels, rabbits, deer, foxes,
sometimes even birds. This
was a time of joy and contentment. Our family was complete, we had two
gorgeous doggies who liked nothing better than to chase rabbits in the
playing field, all over the cliffs and the bump, or to leap into the
back of the estate car for a trip to Pretty Corner Woods, where they
would disappear for several minutes chasing - but never catching -
squirrels... Our intention was always for Holly to have their puppies,
but Skipper could never work out what to do, and we didn't have a clue,
we simply thought that nature would take its course and Skipper's
spectacular genes would be preserved forever in a new generation.
Sadly, that never happened.
In
2017, we took Skipper and Holly for their annual vaccinations, it would
have been in May, I think. Within a few weeks, Holly was diagnosed with
lymphoma, and Skipper with haemangiosarcoma in his eye. Holly became
ill quite quickly, and when we took her to the vet she took some blood
for a blood test and told us Holly's
liver was off the scale, and did we want to say goodbye to her now,
today, as she didn't have long, or would we like her to try Holly on
steroids to see what
happened? Naturally we opted for the latter, and she had another eight
good weeks when she was almost back to normal, chasing her ball,
chasing rabbits, eating well, looking well, the golf-ball-sized
swellings in her throat had disappeared, and we began to hope... but of
course her immune system was more or less non-existent by now. She
caught a nasty infection, again from the caravan people's dogs and was
unable to shake it off. A trip to the vet
for an injection of antibiotics failed to perk her up, and by nine
o'clock in the evening she was failing rapidly. I took her back to see
vet Jane at ten o'clock and sat on the surgery floor with Holly singing
lullabies to her while she went to sleep for the very last time. Holly
was only eight years old, but she had a profound effect on our lives,
and we miss her, still do, terribly. I still talk to Holly, and as I
said, when
we go to bed each evening, I read my book to her, silently, of course,
I tell her I love her and that I will never forget her. She was a
gorgeous girl, and I will never
forget her, and of course I will
always love her. Holly was cheated of long life by the vaccination for
leptospira. There is plenty of well-documented scientific evidence
online about this - we don't blame our vets, they're only doing what
they're supposed to, and until the veterinary profession tells them
otherwise, there are thousands upon thousands of dogs who are
susceptible to cancer who will catch it from these vaccinations. We
were particularly unlucky, with both of our dogs being affected at the
same time. But
with Holly gone, we needed to concentrate all our attention on our
beloved Skipper, who was by now in some danger from the tumour in his
eye.
Vet
Michaela,
examined Skipper's eye and said that she might be able to remove the
small tumour that was growing there. She operated once, and got most of
it, but it grew back. We asked her to try again, and the second time
she again couldn't get all of it, and it grew back again... Finally, in
the
Autumn of 2017, Michaela told us that unless she removed Skipper's eye,
he might die from the tumour, so we gave her the go ahead to do just
that. She promised us that he would make a full recovery and would be
able to cope just perfectly with only one eye, and we trusted her. In
November, we went to collect him from the surgery, not knowing what to
expect. He came staggering drunkenly across the reception area to greet
us, a huge grin on his face, full of life, and looking like something
from a Stephen King novel. For the next twenty-four hours he was mostly
asleep, or rather stoned out of his brain on painkillers and
anti-inflammatories, but then he woke up, had something to eat and
demanded to go for a walk and to play with his ball. If you'll pardon
the pun, he never looked back, and we came to the conclusion that maybe
that small tumour in the corner of his eye had been causing him some
pain, even though he never complained. Skipper coped magnificently with
just one eye, and enjoyed another four years of life, with occasional
infections which gave him an upset tummy, as I've described, but
otherwise he remained in
good health for the rest of his life. Earlier this year, 2021, he
started to struggle with his back legs.
Our
house in Beeston Regis, has a back garden that is ten feet or
so
below
the level of the front room floor. When we first moved in we realised
that there was only one way in and out of the house - via the front
door. The only way to get to the back garden was through the garage!
We're pretty sure this was against the law, and that the council,
who built this small parade of identical houses in 1972, should have
provided a
back door. Of the five pairs of semis, ours was the worst - the only
way out of the house in the
case of fire, was through the front door, and failing that, through one
of the back windows, with a ten-feet drop to the concrete patio below.
Not ideal. When we first moved in, we contracted our next
door neighbour's son to put in a patio door and some steps, and for the
best part of fourteen years, Skipper went up and down these steps quite
happily to get
to his beloved garden, where he would spend most of his time. But for
the last few months of his life, he struggled to get up and down the
steps as arthritis started to trouble him. He
always preferred being outdoors, and would often sleep on the patio in
the evenings from
six o'clock until ten-ish, which was the time I would go down the steps
and gently
wake him up for a final wee and a final drink before bringing him
indoors for a good night's sleep.
On
Thursday 15th April 2021, Skipper reached the grand old age of fifteen
- one hundred and five years old using the old way of calculating dogs'
ages, seven human years to every one dog year. In the morning, he
demanded his treats with a series of barks, then started jumping up and
barking to get me to hurry up and take him for his early morning walk.
He spent a lovely day, ate his lunch, ate all of his dinner (he
was always a fussy eater) and ate his evening treats, then settled down
to sleep the evening away on the patio, as always. The following
morning, the 16th, he wasn't interested in anything at all and we took
him to see Ioannis, the young vet who had fallen in love with him when
he met him a few weeks earlier in the year when he had another
infection that laid him low. Ioannis gave Skipper an antibiotic
injection which
he said should put him right within about ten hours,
but when we got him home, all he wanted to do was sleep. We managed to
get a few drops of water down him, but by four o'clock he had
completely lost the use of his legs. I managed to get him up the back
steps one at a time and eventually into the front room. But he couldn't
really move. When we lifted his front end up, his legs wouldn't support
him, and there was no way he could stand. At five-thirty in the
afternoon of 16th April, the vet sent him off to sleep for the final
time and for us it was the end of an era. Skipper and Holly had
dominated our lives for fifteen years and eight years respectively.
It's three weeks now, as I'm writing this, since Skipper passed away,
and we still look through the patio doors to make sure he's OK down on
the patio. I still think to myself that I will need a lighter jacket
for when we take him for his lunchtime walk. We still open the front
door when we get back from shopping expecting to see him
laying in the
hall waiting to greet us and to give him the "fusspots" he so loved.
Both of us still go to fill his water bowl. We don't know if we will
ever get another doggy. Not to replace Skipper, but just for company,
for someone to look after. We have started looking, but who
knows
what Fate has in store for us?
We
have never ever thought of ourselves as dog owners. Instead, we like to
think of all of our dogs as members of our family, that have come into
our homes to share our lives, loaned to us by God, some people say, and
that seems about right to me. Several times during his last two years
of life, we thought we were losing Skipper because he was so ill with
one of those dreaded, dreadful infections brought by the dogs from
the campsite and the static caravan park which are such a blight on an
area of outstanding natural beauty. North Norfolk District Council have
always been one of the worst councils in Britain, and granting
permission for these horrendous eyesores on our beautiful clifftops has
to go down as one of their worst ever decisions. But every time Skipper
survived, he came back from the brink against all the odds and had a
reputation at the vets' and with us, of course, for being a real
fighter when it came to illness. He
loved life and he loved
us. In return, we gave him everything we could - a happy, loving home,
and all the home comforts he needed and was entitled to. He was a
treasured family member - he was the Special One, and we miss him
terribly.
It
was a privilege to have shared his life and Holly's of course (and all
of our dogs' lives). We've had dogs as part of our lives for over 57
years, and loved them all, but naturally it's the last dog who lived
with you that
affects you so badly when they pass away. We had a particularly soft
spot for Holly, because she was our only girl, and she was taken from
us when she was far too young; God apparently needed her back... and
Skipper had such a profound effect
on us not only because he was our last dog, but also because he was
quite simply so spectacularly beautiful. When Holly went, he seemed to
expand, his heart grew, seemingly to cater for the fact that Holly was
no longer there. If possible, he was more loving than ever before, more
loving than any dog we ever lived with. He made our lives complete, and
now
that we're dogless (we're not sure yet if we will ever have another
doggy
as part of our lives - we're both getting on a bit in years now)
there's a
huge chasm, a void that nothing can fill in the same way that Skipper
filled it.
I
can think of no better epitaph for Skipper the Wonder Dog, as we called
him, than to say that he
brought
only joy into our lives, and made us
happier and better people in the process. Now he's with our beloved
Holly again,
and we can remember him and Holly and all of our other doggies, and the
years of constant joy and
laughter they brought with them when they came into our lives
and changed them forever.
The
small print: Books
Monthly, now well into its 24th
year on the web,
is published on or slightly before the first day of each month by Paul
Norman. You can contact me here.
If you wish to submit something for publication in the magazine, let me
remind you there is no payment as I don't make any money from this
publication. If you want to send me something to review, contact me via
email at paulenorman1@gmail.com and I'll let you know where to send it.
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In
this issue:
The Front Page
The
Nostalgia Page
Children's
Books
Fiction
books
Fantasy
& Science Fiction
Nonfiction
Books
Growing
up in the 1950s
The Silent Three
The Four Marys
Acker
Bilk Sleeve Notes
Pen and
Sword Books
Sundays with Tarzan
The Back Page
Email me
This
is Skipper on the day we first met him, in May 2006. Just look at the
size of those paws!
My
Dad with one of my Gran's many dogs, this one's a border collie, I
think... proof that the family loved dogs, of course! And here's one
with Mum and Dad and the same dog:
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