About Spaniels
Well, we finally took the plunge. We collected Rowan the English Springer Spaniel on 14th January after five years of being Spaniel-less. When you have as much joy from pets as we did from our twin Spaniels Ozzy (14 years) and Ziggy (10 years), it’s always going to be a tough decision to do it all over again. Any such decision was going to have to come from leftfield and last month, as we started to prepare for a Christmas house full, that moment came.
Rewind to sometime in late October. I was recording in my Berevic Studio when I kept hearing fluttering in the gable eaves. It was clearly a pigeon who’d got in and couldn’t get out. Then one day, this annoying but intermittent noise stopped. The pigeon had either escaped or pegged it. So when we heard similar noises in the attic space a couple of weeks later, our initial thought was that the bird (or birds) had got in again.
We’d decided to decorate our bedroom early in December, so later in November we’d had a redundant bedroom sink removed, finished the decorating (the last room in the house we needed to do), and ordered a new carpet. Soon afterwards, we were watching the telly when right above us we heard not fluttering, but scuttling. This being a semi-rural area we see an occasional mouse in the garden but never the house, and have traps set strategically to deter the little bugger(s).
The scuttling continued for a couple of nights and we set a few mouse traps in the attic. The scuttling continued, so we bought a couple of rat traps, at least one of which sprung, without catching the slightly bigger bugger(s). Then we saw evidence of the back doormat being chewed and, later, plain as day saw a young rat running across the lobby from kitchen to hall. We called in the local pest control people: they who successfully removed a wasps’ nest just a couple of months previously!
To cut a long story short, rat was found dead in the studio a couple of days later, having chewed a couple of bodhran beaters, two corners of carpet, and more around the radiator pipes. There was no recurrence, and our Christmas went ahead as originally planned. It seems the sink removal had let this young rat in through the drain, which is now capped off at both ends. Thankfully the rat was just a singleton, and the poison was removed.
Sometime during this traumatic episode, it was decided we needed an animal in the house again. By enormous good fortune, a Kennel Club breeder was able to offer one from a litter born to a working Spaniel family on a farm near Morpeth, just 70 minutes’ drive from here. There was one girl and five boys, and when we found the girl had been reserved, we dropped down to look at the remainder, and Rowan joined our now entirely ratless household. It seems his sister has also ended up in Berwick! Having had Springers before, we know what to expect, especially the unexpected!
Welcome to Berwick Rowan! It is wonderful to have a Spaniel back in our lives. You will be allowed in the studio when you lose your taste for electrical leads.
Peace.
John