Blonde on blonde – Wuff With The Smooth

I remember the day I went to pick Waffle up. Leo had closed the schools in the south and all signs were pointing towards Boris announcing a lockdown. It was a Sunday and the world was in Covid chaos.

Sarah (the oldest of the little humans in the house) had found the hound online.

He was one of three brothers remaining from a litter of cutie Cockachons in Co Leitrim (a place I had hitherto considered alongside Lilliput as somewhere which didn’t really exist) and he and his siblings were up for sale at a paltry price of 250 buckaroos apiece.

“Have you any pups left?” I asked the woman who answered the phone.

“Aye, sure we’ve all three, so we do, so it is,” she replied. “You’ve your pick of two white and one blonde.”

As the world held its breath and as North prepared to go into the first ever lockdown, off I went on that auspicious Sunday evening in my battered Ford Focus with a bottle of water and a bag of Tayto Spring Onion (there may or may not have also been a Snickers Bar for maximum sustenance).

Also positioned on the passenger seat was a large plastic tub and a towel.

On the way, I stopped off at Tesco’s in Enniskillen; I needed puppy food, a dog toy (this was insisted upon by both little humans) and some dog shampoo; this latter commodity would only become vital upon arrival back at the homestead. I also bought beer. The thinking being that the three-day camel ride to Lilliput and back would require maximum refreshment at the finish line.

In hindsight, without the aid of Goggle Maps, I would never have found the seller; they lived in a location as rural as rural can be and although I was concerned after driving past the young lad in
blue dungarees playing Duelling Banjos, my countenance brightened when the lights of the seller’s house finally hoved into view.

“You can take the three of them if you want, so it is, so you can,” the rotund lady-owner (thankfully not in blue dungarees) suggested.

“The wan will do the best, hi, sure, so it is,” I responded in kind.

Waffle (although he wasn’t called Waffle just yet), was ensconced in a wired run beside this lady’s countryside residence along with the mother (a woolly but knackered looking Bichon Frise), the aul boy (a dashingly dark-red coloured Cocker Spaniel) and two other white pups.

Prior to leaving home I was given succinctly strict instructions: “Pick the best pup.”

Although we knew there were two white and one blonde, the names had already been picked.

Were I to pick the blonde, his name would be Waffle. And were I to pick one of the whites, his name would be Noodle.

And so, as I stood beside the wired run outside this back-of-beyond Leitrim home, with a fair quantity of hard-earned folding money in my hip pocket and with the lady and her two daughters looking on expectantly, I couldn’t decide which ‘best pup’ to pick.

All three were as cute as hairy buttons and the trio seemed to revel in the attentions of a T-shirted stranger in a New York Yankees baseball cap, all a-bark as if they’d invented the sound.

“They were all washed today, after you rang to say you were coming,” the rotund lady explained.

This claim I dismissed immediately because all my olfactory nerve was screaming was, “URINE!”

Suddenly I was never so glad as to have portered the large plastic tub and the towel.

I hunkered down beside the three playful pups. I looked from one to another and back again.

They were like the Andrex puppy only cuter and even though they stank to high heaven of pee, I couldn’t help but smile.

In the end my choice was based on one thing and one thing only.

There was little to separate all three pups.

The hues of their coats played second fiddle to their youthful exuberance and cuteness.

However when I stood up and peered down into the pen, one of
the pups popped up on his hind legs to lick my hand.

My thinking was: The blonde one is clearly the friendliest.

“I’ll take that one, so I will, so it is,” I told the woman and after the blonde one (soon to be named Waffle) was relocated to the plastic tub, I parted with the wad of folding money, thanked the woman and took my leave.

On the drive back, Waffle whined the whine of a creature distraught; wrenched away from the only family he had ever known; it was the whine of one who knows for as long as they live, they will never again know happiness.

And my heart surely broke. The only way, it seemed, that Waffle could be comforted at all, was when I laid the palm of my hand against his smooth belly.

This worked well for a time, until the twisting Lilliput roads conveyed a discomfiture into said belly and the little tyke chundered into the plastic tub and then proceed to step around in it.

“Ack, wee buddy,” I said, my palm sticky with gastric juices. And yet, so tiny and so timid and so homesick did he appear, I couldn’t take my hand away.

To be continued…