I realise there is a long way to go but knowing you are sleeping better and able to drive must buck you up no end, you will get there EL.

That's a good start on your road to recovery, El.

No Moonie today?

Great news about your shoulder El, slow and steady is the key to a successful, long term recovery I'm pleased you're doing well Yogi, I wonder where moonie is too? Hope he's ok

Hi Summer, how are things today?

Hi yogi all a bit busy really, we've been to the hospital, the registrars and the funeral directors. We've done all the urgent things, the rest we can relax a little more about. How was your day?

 I hope Mr Summer is doing okay.

 

I spent the morning in the garden (weeding and pruning) when it was cooler, and did some housework in the afternoon. Pretty boring really.

I love just pottering about the house & garden, I always feel content doing things like that any sign of your blackbird friends? Mr summer is doing alright considering the circumstances, I think he's still taking it all in really. I'm taking good care of him though

I now have two pairs of blackbirds plus their babies coming to my window ledge - it is costing me a fortune in raisins.

It does take time to sink in but I know you will be taking good care of Mr Summer.

Lol have they been bringing their friends now too?

I've got a blackbird creche going on! It's quite funny how the babies trust me, just because their parents do. I stand right beside the kitchen window ledge and they come right beside me to eat the raisins.

You may remember the pic of my dad hand-feeding a female blackbird? Unfortunately, she disappeared and never came back but he now has a male blackbird which feeds from his hand. He obviously has more patience than me!

I think the birds sense that there's no danger from you & your family yogi that, and they must really like the raisins lol When's PB coming over next?

Not until Sunday. I'll need lots of cuddles by then.

Absolutely, you'll have to fight them boys off when they try to cuddle her

 It's like a rugby scrum, to see who can get to her first.

 

I'm finding the site a bit coggy atm, so if I suddenly disappear, you'll know I've been booted out.

No worries yogi

It seems okay now.

Got to go now, goodnight Summer, sweet dreams.

Moonie, hope you are okay and will be back tomorrow.

good morning Yogi, sorry for vanishing last night without saying goodnight, I hope you slept well Moonie, I hope you're back today too

Good  morning everyone. Weather is cloudy atm. Partly cloudy with some sunshine is forecast.

You were an early bird this morning, Summer.

Moonie, I hope you are okay and back with us today.

 

Good morning everyone

 

I overslept again so am a bit late.

 

Sunny but a bit fresher here than the last few days.

 

Good morning everyone, lovely stories about the blackbirds Yogi.  I wonder where moonie is, I hope the heat isn't getting to him.

 

I am glad you have managed to get through most of the formalities Summer, it's a difficult time.

 

Sounds like you are catching up on your sleep EL, it is a bit fresher.

 

Off to a little tea party this afternoon.  Our house group 'end of term' get together, there will be cakes - yum, I will try and bring back a doggie bag for you all

Enjoy your "end of term" tea party, Squiggle. I look forward to our doggy bag.

 

El, your body will probably be catching up on the sleepless nights you had when your shoulder was really painful.

I thought I would share this lovely story that caught at my heart

 

The dog whose last gift was to teach me how to live: Muffin saw her owner through all life's highs and lows... then in death she imparted the greatest lesson of all

• Barney Bardsley has written a book about how her dog Muffin helped her get over her husband's death
• Husband Tim was diagnosed with cancer and died in 2004 aged 47
  
• Muffin kept Barney company when her daughter Molly left for university
• It was only when Muffin died that Barney accepted death is nothing to be afraid of
  

By Barney Bardsley

PUBLISHED: 23:33, 10 July 2013 | UPDATED: 07:46, 11 July 2013

Over the past 20 years I have lost many loved ones: from my best friend to my mother, my father and my husband.

In all cases, I was present in their last days, even hours, but never once at the point of death. 

That meant one deep and abiding question remained with me. How on earth does one do it? How do we die? 

Well, now I know. And it took my little dog Muffin to show me. 

Last April, after 12 years of devoted service, she slipped away from the world with me by her side.

And she did so with such simplicity and ease that I felt a mystery had been revealed to me.

True, she needed help to die, but she accepted that help with a certain gratitude, even relief.

She left in a tiny sun’s ray of satisfaction. And all my fears about our final moments were suddenly erased.

It comes as no surprise to me that it was my part-collie, part-spaniel who would teach me one of life’s most profound lessons: acceptance of and dignity in death.

A rather wise and weather-beaten little soul, Muffin was not only a joyful companion in the usual doggy way — with all those playtimes, toys and bouncy, long walks — she was a teacher, a nurse, a silent therapist. 

She stood by me through the death of my husband Tim, only 47, to cancer in 2004 and provided welcome company when our only child Molly left home for university seven years later.

In my opinion, dogs are far more than mere pets; they are also symbols of great devotion, as potent now as they were in the ancient world, when man first tamed them to act as hunters, servants and good companions. 

Muffin was unstintingly loyal from the moment she walked, or jumped, into our lives. Molly, then seven, was desperate for a pet, but it was Tim’s boyhood dream we were fulfilling.

Five years before, he’d been diagnosed with cancer of the thymus which he had just been told was terminal — news he received with characteristic courage and quiet stoicism.

From then on, it was a matter of waiting for the inevitable. I can’t remember when we decided a dog would help but it was the best decision we would ever make. 

The moment Tim, Molly and I walked into the RSPCA dog pound in Leeds in 1999, Muffin headed straight for Tim.

This was odd, because she was a mere scrap of a thing — at three years old she’d been woefully mistreated and was just a big pair of eyes with a skeleton attached.

Meanwhile, Tim was a strapping man of 6ft 5in, with a deep voice and an imposing manner. 

Nonetheless, she shot directly at him, jumping at his legs over and over, as if to say: ‘I’ve got him! This one’s mine!’

For the past four years of his life she became Tim’s chief ally and companion.

I will be for ever grateful to her for the pleasure she gave him, at a time when he was withdrawing from the regular channels of human interaction.

Who cared that Tim had cancer? He could throw a ball, couldn’t he?

So what if he needed lots of rest and swallowed a pharmacy-load of pills every day just to keep going?

After he started doing his job as an arts administrator from home, Tim had all the more time to lavish on Muffin. 

Although terminally ill, his health was reasonably stable throughout 2000.

He could eat well and was fit enough to walk. Thus began the epic exercise routine for man and dog, focused around long rambling excursions to the local wood and park. 

Slowly, the dog’s enthusiasm infected the man.

Tim bought proper walking boots.

He kitted himself out with thick jackets, waterproof trousers. 

No matter what the weather — and it can be unbelievably foul up here on our high northern hills — the walk was an immovable fixture in his calendar. 

He set off each day with determination and vigour, the little dog bouncing happily by his side. 

Around this time, I was frantic with worry and used to drive my poor husband wild with questions. How was he? What was he thinking? What could I do to make things better? 

But Muffin short-circuited all of that. She asked nothing, made no demands. Her only function was to be alongside, whatever the terrain.

There is a world of sophistication in this kind of simplicity. We just cannot reach it from within our human limitations.

When, after a couple of years, Tim’s health began to decline, Muffin simply adjusted her step to her master’s.

Gone were the two-hour hikes, but she didn’t complain. If it was a good day, she would totter down the road with him, just to feel the breeze on their faces. 

If it was warm outside, she would sit by his deckchair and keep a kind of guard, as he read the paper, listened to the radio, dozed and dreamed.

If things were bad and the pain or sickness descended, Muffin simply shifted her position to the bottom of the sofa or the side of the bed. 

On these occasions, quietness and fortitude would fall upon the dog.  She lay for hours at a time simply bearing witness. Occasionally she would stir, moving closer to lick his hand gently or to let him stroke her head, her silky ears.

Her eyes were like dark pools, absorbing the atmosphere and drawing the suffering away from him and into herself — or so it seemed to me.

Eventually, Tim was admitted to the local hospice, where he remained for four months. Thankfully Muffin was allowed to visit as often as we liked.

Everything was a blur as Tim made his final transition from life to death. In the few pictures I have of this time, everyone looks white and strained beyond endurance.

But there she is at the edges of a couple of images, a contrasting black, furry figure among all the anxious humans — Muffin. 

She was entirely undemanding at this time. Her walks were minimal and she went mostly ignored in an atmosphere of permanent crisis. Even in these extremes, she played her part.

Molly and I had seen Tim almost every day for the length of his hospice stay. Yet when he chose to die on January 8, 2004, it was nine in the morning. 

The time between the phone call to say the end was imminent and his actual death was too short for me to make the brief journey to be with him. 

When I got there, he had gone. His spirit still filled the room, but his body was an empty house. I felt cheated, but not surprised. Tim was an intensely private man, and what can be  more intimate than the moment of your death?

People assume we coped better because we’d had a whole decade to prepare. But a train crash is still a catastrophe, even if you dreamed about it ten years earlier. Death is always, to life-fixated humans, a disaster.

After Tim died, the mood in the house was solemn and slow. Muffin took her cue from this for a while, but then gradually, as her family started to emerge, she reintroduced a sense of fun. 

Molly was 11: old enough to feel the full force of her dad’s loss, young enough to still find comfort in play. And this is where Muffin filled another special role; the two of them gambolled together like puppies.

She was there for the dark times, too, though. I tried to do my weeping alone but whenever I opened my bedroom door, Muffin would always be there. 

What she did was as natural to her as breathing, but the gift of it, in its simple beauty and grace, will never leave me.

In the following years, her unconditional love was particularly gratifying for me, a single parent. Through the sometimes choppy years of adolescence, there was always a welcome home in our hallway. Whether for mother or for daughter, Muffin’s tail relentlessly wagged. 

Over time, I found myself alone with the dog more and more.

We were a mutual consolation and communicated well: me, talking my way through the minutiae of the domestic day; she, in silence, offering a finely-tuned raise of her chestnut eyebrow and the occasional sympathetic lick.

In 2011, when Molly left for university, it was just the dog and me keeping each other company, day and night.

I knew she was tired by then. Her sleeps were longer, the walks perfunctory and the lists of ailments ever longer. She had suffered a mini stroke earlier that summer.

Her hips were stiff and her balance wobbly. She was well into borrowed time. I knew it. And I think she knew it, too.

While it would be absurd to say that the feeling engendered by Muffin’s frailty was in any way equivalent to the grief at losing my husband, my mother or my father (who himself died of a stroke in 2010), there was a sense in which everyone who’d been taken from me in recent years became suddenly illuminated through the dog’s suffering, and wrapped in a fresh and heavy sadness.

Thankfully, the end, when it came, was just as I had always wished: gentle, calm, touched with grace.
I woke up one morning last April to find her lying conked out in the hall. I knew the game was up.

Carefully, I picked her up and put her in a warm bath to make her clean and comfortable. Muffin had always loathed having a bath, and used to struggle furiously to escape, shaking angry soap bubbles over the entire house in protest at the indignity of it all. But that day she surrendered without complaint. 

The sensation of the water, and the careful drying and brushing, seemed to soothe her. She curled up in her basket and fell asleep.

Then I made two calls: one to a friend whose judgment in these matters I trusted entirely and the other to Muffin’s vet. When I explained what had happened, the vet did not demur — all the signs were there. The dear dog had finally had enough. 

‘I think she knows, Mum,’ said my daughter, who was back from university for some time off. She was able to take a few moments alone with Muffin to say her own goodbye. 

At 3pm a duty vet and his assistant knocked on the door.

When they came into the back room, Muffin did not stir.

I’m not sure she even knew they were there, which is how I wanted it.

I sat by her head, stroking her ears and murmuring reassurance, while the vet clipped the fur on her back leg and looked for a vein to inject into. 

There was no struggle, no consternation, no fuss, no unnecessary talk.

Just once, before the needle made contact, Muffin roused herself and gathered a big, shuddering breath, the way she had done through her life when resting, as if to say: ‘Hold on, isn’t there something I am meant to be doing, some final duty to perform?’ 

But I soothed and stroked her and she settled back down gratefully.

The injection went in cleanly, skilfully, without pain or protest.

And it was done. In a second or two, her eyes quietly closed and she drifted away. 

At that moment I could not be sorry because it was the right thing. She was free.

I had always disbelieved the medical staff who tried so hard to reassure me that ‘it was very peaceful’ when the person I loved had actually died, since much that I had often seen in the days leading up to that death would suggest otherwise.

And the dying process can indeed be apocalyptic for some, though by no means for all.

If Muffin’s example was anything to go by, then death is no torture, no tragedy even, just a simple release: you’re alive, then dead; there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s the completion of a little world.

That didn’t mean I wasn’t sad, of course. It was a few days before I broke down. I lay down on the sofa in the back room and closed my eyes, expecting to fall asleep.

Tears came instead, and before I knew it I was wailing like a banshee. 

A week later, grief struck again, but this time it demanded action rather than surrender. The following day, I took the powder blue tube containing Muffin’s ashes to the woods.

There, I scattered them under the big holly tree where I’d put some of Tim’s ashes. Man and dog together again. 

Now, when I go for walks, I think of them both. The other day I was alone under the canopy of leaves when I had the strangest and loveliest sensation. I could feel Muffin’s presence. 

All trace of her old age and infirmity was gone. She was young again and running, light-footed and invisible, just a few elusive steps up ahead, her fur snagged occasionally by the brambles, and wearing a nonchalant leaf in her long, tangled ear. 

And that, for me, is where she will be now, like the puff of a dandelion’s head seeded lightly in the breeze: dancing, somewhere in the undergrowth.

My wise and faithful friend taught me so much: not just through her final moments. Not just about death. But about life itself, and how to live it well.

■ OLD Dog by Barney Bardsley, to be published on July 18 by Simon & Schuster, price £7.99. © 2013 Barney Bardsley. To order a copy for £6.49 (including p&p), call 0844 472 4157.

I hope Moonie's OK, did log on yesterday evening at 10 but didn't post anything.

 

Squiggle, I hope your end of term tea party goes well My mother used to go to the church's Ladies Group meetings and they also had a little party just before the summer break.

Squiggle, an extremely moving story

Hiya Buddies  

I'm not feeling all that well right now. I will see you soon  

Moonie, I hope you are feeling better soon

Hope you feel better soon

Take care of yourself and hope you are back with us soon.

Even if you have zero interest in cricket you might want to watch today's highlights on Channel 5 at 7pm.

Quite possibly the most extraordinary day in cricket history. If a script writer had gone to their producers with such a script before today, the script writer would have been laughed at for such a preposterous story - it almost rivals the alien abduction in the Colbys.

lol El, you have almost persuaded me to watch the cricket highlights.

 

Squiggle, what a lovely story about Muffin the dog. I never doubt the power of love and loyalty, whether it comes from humans or dogs.

Brief Encounter is on Film 4+1 at 4.25pm today, if anyone is interested. Sorry for being so late with the info but I've just seen it myself.

Yogi, Friday week 19 July BBC4 Proms on Four from 7.30pm.

The Japanese pianist is performing Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto number 2. That is the famous piece of music so associated with Brief Encounter.

 Thanks El.

I'm recording Brief Encounter, to watch when I get some time by myself.

Squiggle it was very difficult to not cry when reading Muffin's story, I loved it though. dog's really are wonderful therapy, mine has brought me so much comfort and calm, I know you all know just how much I love her Moonie, sorry to hear you are feeling unwell, I hope you get well real soon

It was a lovely story Muffin's story, it sort of summed up the nobility of dogs to me.  My daughter's dog has had quite a day, she was very naughty yesterday sulking at having to come home after a long walk on the beach.  She ran off and when my daughter found her she was giving her the look that demanded more games.  Now today she ran off when my youngest grandson had taken her for a walk and brought her home and left the door open, she was off like a shot.   Guess where she ended up?  At my friend's house about half a mile away.  There was a phone call because my landline number is on her tag.  I was out at the tea party so called the number and a lady answered.  I thought the voice sounded familiar.  She said my son knows more I will put him on and I said is that you John?  Isn't that amazing, of all the houses she could have picked

 

Tea was very pleasant, lovely sunny day with a beautiful breeze.  We sat in the garden under a gazebo.  I just had one scone which was enough for me, I have brought treats

 

 

Delicious squiggle! Thank you I'm pleased the tea party was a big success I've just been reading an article in a magazine about a company called the picnic boat, they take you out for a boat road while you have afternoon tea Crikey what's got in that dog lol maybe the sunshine? It might bring out the mischief in them I'm glad no harm came to her though Bramble is fast asleep, her long walk has tired her

Squiggle, thanks for the goodies. How clever of your daughter's dog to make for a house where the owners knew the dog

The BBFC (the film certifiers) published their annual report today. Apparently someone complained to them about the original and best Railway Children film saying that it encouraged children to play on railway tracks.

The BBFC replied saying the BBFC judged that it was "very unlikely" that The Railway Children would promote "such dangerous activity".

"The Railway Children is set in the Edwardian period and trains and access to railway property are very different today," the censor said.

"The film also demonstrates the potential harm to children if proper care is not taken."