Miffy dog

Miffy is dog no. 3. We gave her that name when we got her as her original moniker was ‘Bo’. Sweet enough but useless because it rhymes with ‘no.’ How to confuse a greyhound in one easy step...

Miffy is the sweetest dog imaginable, a bit of a loner, self-effacing and a tad shy. She gets beaten up badly by Susie boss lady so tends to hide under tables and give the old cow a wide berth. She fulfilled the brief of a ‘proper greyhound’, being white with brindle patches, and we’ve had her for three years now as she approaches her eighth birthday. Her first experience of the cut was being offloaded out of the car at Streethay Wharf, running to the very end of the moorings and throwing herself in like a lemming. Maybe she’d seen Ray’s prices...

Miffy is perhaps the most reliable of the gang except for those rare occasions when she has what we term a ‘Plan M’. A ‘Plan M’ means sneaking off when no-one’s looking, disregarding all calls to return, and generally engaging in independent thoughts and action. Perhaps the best example of a ‘Plan M’ was at Dutton Locks on the Weaver. We were moored up on the visitor moorings there and I was giving the hounds their evening constitutional. Being the reliable ones, I had let Susie and Miffy off their leads as we approached the boat. Normally they would just hop back in but Miffy decided that it was time for a bit of fun. She legged it off into the picnic area and then disappeared round the backs of the houses that sit set back from the lock. I dutifully went after her, walking along the lane at the front of the houses in a bid to catch her when she came out the other side.

Well, she didn’t appear and as I got to the last house, I saw a couple in the front of their garden tending to the beds, with their three dogs running around behind them. At the rear of the garden was a grass bank that divided the lawn from BW’s vast dredging pool. At the very moment when I asked this couple whether they’d seen a white and brindle greyhound, up she pops like a meerkat on the bank and all hell breaks loose. Well, actually, all the dogs just went like the clappers over the dried mud trying to sniff out the rabbit population that had sensibly taken cover. Miffy was soon out of puff and reattached to her lead, with me offering profuse apologies to the couple for the intrusion. Dogs are such show-ups aren’t they? Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.