One can tell by my eyes that I’ve probably been crying forever

Firstly, thank you all so much for the kind comments. I just didn’t have it in me to respond.

I went to the vegetable shop yesterday and despite my efforts to hide my swollen eyes with big sunglasses the attendant asked me if I was alright- which I guess means I look as if I’m not.

Rudy’s first day with us, being inspected by Tara & Morgan (Sotogrande, Spain – 2012) They took to each other instantly.

Each day is a little bit easier than the day before, but I won’t lie, none of it is easy. Rudy was the Bart Simpson of dogs which meant that for much of the day I was supervising nearby, making sure he didn’t get up to anything too dangerous. Like when he’d hide perfectly still in bushes waiting for unsuspecting birds – and then there were feathers everywhere.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet I found this video which I uploaded many years ago and completely forgot about until this week. It was taken on a cloudy day in the summer of 2012 as he discovered the joys of the Kong toy.

It captures his personality perfectly. A playful little thug with an enormous heart. His life started off with great difficulties. He was thrown over a shelter wall with a badly broken femur and was going to be put down when a most spectacular woman by the name Inge Virnich stepped in and saved him. She paid for everything to fix him up and then invited us to meet him once he was well. He threw himself at us a bit like a kamikaze pilot; a habit he never lost. And that was it.

He spent the day pitter pattering around as if about to break into a flamenco solo. He was intense. Intensely demanding, intensely affectionate, intensely naughty. Intensely hungry for food and life.

First week, he thought this was a perfectly reasonable spot to sit.

These two were by Summer Girls (obviously!)

That’s it from me for a bit. If I don’t answer your comments for a while, please forgive me. This was so out of the blue, I just wasn’t emotionally prepared for it and I’m having enough trouble keeping it together so the others don’t get stressed.

Every day at happy hour he’d stare at the nuts and olives just waiting for me to make one little mistake so he could pounce.