This was the closest I could get to a pic of Fernando
Our one dog, Jimmy used to have a bed called Fernando. I’m not entirely sure where the name originated or even why we decided to name his bed in the first place. I think it may have had something to do with the fact that we moved it around the house, upstairs, downstairs and outside for Jimmy to lie on. So, instead of longwindedly asking each other, ‘Where’s Jimmy’s bed?’ We’d just say, ‘Where’s Fernando?’ It was a time saving strategy, see? Yes… our dogs are very spoilt. We have two spoilt mongrels (they really are mongrels from the Animal Anti Cruelty League): Jimmy and Idumbe.
Jimmy is part bearded collie and part pavement special. He was our first dog and was also an only dog for a good couple of years before Idumbe came along. Jimmy is a dog with… quirks. For instance he likes to sleep in the shower.
So, very often when friends come around, they’ll get the fright of their lives in the guest bathroom when they look up and see Jimmy snoring away in the shower. It also gets us some strange looks when one of us asks: ‘Where’s Jimmy?’ And the other replies, ‘In the shower’. He also gets upset with you if you cough. He’ll physicslly remove himself from a room – glaring at you over his shoulder as he storms out – if he’s in there and you dare to have a bronchial spasm.
Idumbe gets her name from the African potato, the amadumbe. When we adopted her she was skinny with a big round belly and scraggly hair. Her name couldn’t have been anything but little brown African potato. Idumbe is part German Shepherd and part Brown Dog. A very small part, like maybe her back paws and her left ear are Shepherd. And a large portion is everything else. She’s the canine equivalent of mixing all the crayons in your pencil case together.
Having said that, she’s also one of the smartest dogs I’ve evet met. And I’ve met a few! It’s actually reached the point where my Mister and I have to spell certain words out so Idumbe won’t know what we’re saying. We taught her what ‘downstairs’ means to send her outside if we were upstairs. Now, whenever we’re upstairs and someone accidentally says the word ‘down’, she’ll get super excited and charge downstairs as fast as her potato chip legs will carry her.
Jimmy and Idumbe are a part of our family. And now we have Holly too. And I’m so excited for her to get to know her dog friends better. I see them playing together in the garden when she’s a little bit older. I see her sharing her marmite sarmies with Idumbe and combing Jimmy’s hair with her little pink doll’s brush.
Biscuits, blooms & banter 