Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

Shelby's back from his holidays so he's been keeping me busy today, what with bathing him (he smells of talcum power now) and playing with him and, most recently, introducing him to the piano.

I think he found it rather frightening at first: he was sort of vaguely barking at me, not quite sure if it was a wise thing to do or not, perhaps worried the piano would jump at him if he taunted it too much. Then when I called him over he sort of crawled towards me, in case sudden movements startled the piano into doing something rash.

He's getting used to normal piano sounds now, he's still not walking close to it out of choice but it has't attacked yet so he's starting to feel comfortable around it. But I'm just lulling him into a false sense of security before I whip out my array of MIDI sounds tomorrow. He's not going to like the helicopter sounds or the sirens, and I don't quite know what he'll make of the MIDI dog.

Also, I think he likes me more than Andy. I think it's because he heard about Andy telling Leavy she's his favourite. You can't go saying that kind of thing to dogs, even if you say it in confidence it'll get back to the others. And Andy was insensitive enough to say it in front of Goldie and Pippa too. Harsh.

Which reminds me of one other thought about dogs: Andy's heroic rescue of Leavy. Leavy is a bit of a daredevil: she likes running along narrow ledges, balancing on wobbly things like inflatables and doing big jumps. As you can imagine, this meant lots of falling in the water during our holidays. Mostly she was close to the edge so was able to rescue herself, but when we were in Rossmore, Leavy somehow managed to fall off the long jetty about as far from shore as she could be whilst still being on land. And the jetty was quite high, so she couldn't just climb back out. She needed to swim for the slipway, but dogs are often a little thick so just shouting "SWIM FOR THE SLIPWAY" wasn't going to work.

So, like the true hero he is, Andy jumped ashore from our boat, sprinted along the jetty and dived in after Leavy, then accompanied her to the kayak I had paddled out to meet her and shoved her aboard. It really was worthy of a Marvel comic, and he was even wearing a black neoprene suit to do the rescuing (his wetsuit). All he's lacking is a mask and a cloak, then he could be DogMan, although I'd worry he'd only rescue his favourite dog and leave all the others to their fate. He's mean like that.