Puppy ballets on ice

Our newish Norfolk Terrier puppy Coco has discovered ice. She regards it as a revelation: ‘How,’ she thinks, ‘Can a solid slide about on the floor and become a liquid?’

I should point out that Coco’s name is already down for Winchester, and we’ve begun saving just in case she doesn’t make the scholarship into Oxford. Her name might be Coconut, but she is very bright indeed. Every night as I tuck Coco into her bed, I say “Just remember darling, you’re brighter than the Prime Minister”. She doesn’t know that I say the same thing to the front door, the beam that runs across our entrance hall, and my Lands End yomping shoes.

Anyway, I was bashing into the frozen water with an ice-pick this afternoon (those freezer trays never do what it says they should in the brochure) and a random lump of ice jumped out, landing just outside Coco’s den. Intrigued, she jumped out and bit it. The cube did not squeak or stay still; instead, it shot off across the tiles and bounced enticingly off the Aga.

For the next five minutes until the ice turned into a trail of water, Coco chased it round the kitchen like a demented rat. And by the time I’d given her a third fragment to nose around the hall, the pup had become the inhabitant of a pinball machine, bouncing off every hard surface as the melting solids zoomed off in entirely unpredictable directions.

At the end of this interlude, she was completely knackered. But this was partly due to the fact that earlier, she’d been on her first very, very long and very, very wild walk. We had wandered through forests, down by the side of bubbling streams, up steep hills and through puddles of muddy depth – from which she emerged looking like a chocolate bar on stilts.

Tonight, she is in her favourite cushion – front legs tucked under here head in a heavily-breathing picture of canine peace. She is out for the count. As are we.