Blind Dog In Trouble

We finally moved house at the weekend and despite the set-back of being unable to retrieve our big furniture from the Wharf, the move went relatively smoothly. We enlisted the services of a ‘man with a van’ AKA Larry ‘Nails’ Thomas, who arrived promptly at Piccolo Hill, loaded up and started the slow journey from one side of the Island to the other with our goods loaded up on the back of his truck! We left the dogs at Piccolo with Henry, returning to collect them along with the last minute items we’d forgotten an hour or so later.
So for a week or so we have been without any sofas or chairs, dining table, bedroom furniture and curtains, all of which I’ve had shipped from the UK. We were going to go for cheap but functional, but somehow that got lost in translation once I started shopping!
So to the title of this post. Back in our three storey house in the UK, we had stair gates fitted at every point of danger. As almost all properties here are single storey, we hadn’t had to bother with such things and Pippy quickly learnt her way around and had no points of danger either inside the house or in the garden.


It was quite amazing to watch her count the steps down to the garden from the new veranda and work out where the rooms were in the house. For the first few days we used the clothes airer as a barrier at the bottom of our new steep stairs. We quickly realised that both blind and sighted doggies had worked out how to squeeze through the bars and get upstairs. This was soon replaced by a more substantial barrier.
This morning as I come out of the bedroom, I spotted Pippy at the top of the stairs. By the time I had said ‘careful’ and ‘stop’ she had taken a step to the left and began tumbling down the stairs, barrel rolling all the way until she reached the bottom. Andy ran down to pick her up and even after this terrifying experience her little tail was still wagging. Andy sat with her for a few minutes before putting her down and checking her all over. Thankfully there was no sign of any injury, but I am sure she will be a bit stiff tomorrow.
It reminded me of the moment when your baby rolls off the bed and there’s nothing you can do to stop it happening (and yes, that happened twice –once for each son!)