A New Clothes-Prop.

The old prop fell apart the other day, so this afternoon I made a replacement out of a piece of wood that had been destined to be some integral part of a beehive. I know the broken one was at least seven years old but, just how much more I couldn’t tell you. Its ultimate demise was due to a good friend; I can see him now, standing there with the bed linen flapping in his face, and his head cocked over at an acute angle so that he could chew on the prop which was the last tangible relic of his existence on this Earth.
 
As far as I am aware, virtually all mammals are bilaterally symmetrical, but there was one notable exception – the exception being Logan. You’ll have heard of a breed of dog known as the “Heinz 57;” the particular divine creator responsible for Logan took the concept to a higher level of art form – or else he was a demented soul with a warped sense of humour; for Logan was a dog of many parts with not one of them matching any of the others. To see him walking down the street put one in mind of a drunken sailor just returned from the sea; with no two legs being the same length, his normal gait had something of a lurch to it and his body, being somewhat short, needed to be on the skew to prevent his legs tangling with one another. The rest of his anatomy followed a similar pattern with one ear being usually erect and facing forwards and the other folded and pointing towards the back; then his head and tail were out of proportion both with each other and with his body. To round off this appearance nicely, he normally wore a thread of saliva over his nose.
 
We never worked out why he chewed the clothes prop, he didn't chew other wood and he was never hungry though, when he first arrived at TD Towers at the age of three, he was not quite sure when his next meal would be; anxious to maintain an adequate nutritional input, he learnt to open the garden gate and would wander off down the road. We eventually discovered that he was disappearing to the local hostelry where he could supplement his diet. It was a life-style that was abandoned once we had gained his confidence, a process that took approximately the same brief period as that during which his fur turned grey. We used to joke that this premature greying was due to the stresses of living in the TD household; however, he was laid-back, streetwise and implacable; a dog of this world who would handle anything life could throw at him. Cowering under the bed on Guy Fawkes’ night was not for him; if he was lying in front of the door that you wished to go through, tough, he wasn’t moving for anybody. The Old Lady, while on one of her visits, once came to me white-faced to tell me he was dead, and lying underneath the rhubarb; she’d spoken to him, stroked him, called him, even prodded him, but without him showing any signs of life. Dead? Nah, he was quite comfortable thank you, just dozing in the shade.
 
Shortly before The Lad died, I was swinging him around the garden on a length of rope, a favourite game, when he lost his grip and went tumbling across the lawn; that momentary loss of his dignity made us realise that we had not taken on an adolescent dog those few short years ago, but one fast approaching old age. The extra is of him taken just before he moved in and became a permanent fixture.