Beaky's Ode

My dog Rebecca seems to have been the Woodford Green answer to waste disposal. I think the council there paid a geneticist to somehow combine the DNA of a Golden Retriever with the atoms of a black bin bag.

Of course, they said her mother, Gracie, was one of those regal Flat Coated retrievers whose tails never stop wagging. That could well be true, because Rebecca looks very much like one. A Flattie, that is, not a black bin bag-Heaven help me if she did! My hair would be all static, if that was the case.

However, mercifully it’s not. She’s a hairy thing that smells of dead moved lawn-hay, if you will. She has taken to letting her flab spread out on my formerly magenta carpet this summer, and today she’s knackered from being chased by a flapping tea towel. I think she has a phobia of them; whenever my mother flicks one at her, Becca goes barmy. She starts running around the garden, barking. It’s a bit like her hatred of newspapers and magazines-or paper in general, as some of my thankfully obsolete novel notes discovered, being on floor. She has to rip and tear them up. She even eats little strips; my dad gets annoyed when she munches down the day’s crossword before he’s even had a chance to pick up a pen.

I call her an eco-friendly solution to disposing of biodegradable household waste because that is what she does. She eats everything-well, nearly everything. She’s not too fond of cress or cucumber, but she’ll happily clean your finished tub of ice-cream or lick the leftover gravy off your plate. Her hearing is excellent; Bex can go from deep sleep to at your feet across the house in a nanosecond, no matter how carefully you ease open the cupboard door.

Her sight on the other is deplorable. She’s not blind, just selectively short-sighted or a bit dense, I guess. You can throw a white biscuit down a dark carpet, and even with her great big snout she cannot find it without human help. It’s funny to watch though; snuffle snuffle and then gobble with a violent wag of her great rudder as she finally finds the grape or the wine-gum.

She’s a funny dog, my Rebecca. I bet she could enter the Guinness Book of Records for fastest ever time taken to eat a Cornish cornet, sans flake as we don’t want to poison her. We’ve had that scare already, when the fox left something rotten in the garden. The pair of us have learnt our lesson. I keep an eye on her and she eats my unwanted mashed potato. It’s a fair deal; we’re both happy with it and hopefully we will be for more years yet.