It has been rather a sad week as we had to take Charlie on a final trip to the vet on Monday because his kidneys had failed. Now I am going to have to find another first mate or sail solo.
If you have read any of the brief m
entions of holidays earlier in this blog you will have seen we had two King Charles spaniels. Charlie was the older of the two and was approaching 15 1/2 years old – Definitely a good age for a breed of dog that is expected to live about 10 to 12 years. We originally got him as company for my wife when we were living in a bungalow after her first stroke and she was stuck in the house all day while the kids were at school.
He may not have featured all that often in this blog but he was an ever present helper whenever I was doing anything around the house or garden. I have been restoring this boat for a third of his life so he was there for a lot of the process just not quite enough to come sailing with me.
Making sail covers, the mast cleanup, making
new standing rigging and similar jobs were all consistently inspected and progress ticked off. Online shopping for boat parts and research jobs would be checked over, usually from the end of the spare bed next to the computer in the study. Anything going on in the garage or on the drive was remotely monitored through the front window. Yes he may have really been waiting for a chance to persuade me to take him on a walk but he was very vigilant and if possible was never more than about 2 feet away from what I was doing.
For some reason he had a passion for licking any piece of metal that he could get to so you can imagine there were a fair number of bits of equipment that got the benefit of a quick polishing during his quality approval process and lighter tools had a habit of moving around when I wasnt actually using them. I am sure he would have learned to help if only he could properly grip tools like Grommit in the animated films.
Despite having a heart murmur, being on medication for that and the vet having advised us not to take him for long walks, it was only 9 days ago that he refused to go on a short cut home and wouldn’t move in any direction other than over the bridleway bridge , round a local nature reserve and
back home via a route we regularly used when he was a year or so old. That was around 3 miles more than I was intending to take him.