A mighty will in a tiny body

Ah, poor Toffee. And poor Danielle, for that matter. Poor me too, perhaps, though I had less to put up with – just a brief interruption of sleep.

Why poor Toffee? One of the reasons we wanted a second toy poodle is that we thought it would be fun to breed from her. We found Luci, our first toy poodle, such fun that we thought a second one, and then some puppies, would just multiply the pleasure. It’s certainly turned out that just adding Toffee to the household took the poodle amusement level up several notches.

The thing about Toffee is that she has a personality that completely compensates for her lack of physical size. She knows what she wants. She likes to make sure she gets it. You should see her if she’s found some awful mouldy piece of meat in the park: we can chase her all over the place, but she’ll never drop it or even let us lay a finger on her.

Another example is breakfast. She and Luci like to take their time over it. It’s dog biscuits rather than soft food, so they don’t wolf it down the way they do with food they like better. They leave some of it in their bowls.

But just let Misty, our cat, get anywhere near it. Toffee will be out there like a shot and growling ferociously. I watched her this morning, and saw how Misty, twice her weight, backed away intimidated by her ferocity.

The heart of a lion in a teeny-weeny body.

Because that’s the other thing about Toffee. She really is minuscule. Which rather spoiled the second part of her plan. Breed from her? Would she be able to handle a pregnancy? Where would we find a male small enough for a pregnancy not to cause her harm?

That all came to a head a few weeks ago. We’re beginning to plan for a move to Spain rather sooner than we’d originally planned – Brexit oblige and all that – and another move probably means we don’t need a litter of puppies to complicate things. Given we were already in two minds about it, that really rather killed the plan to breed from Toffee.

So that was it. Toffee went under the knife and came back wombless.

Toffee with her mate, on their couch
She's in her blue post-op coat, poor thing
Though it's much better than those ghastly cones....

Now Toffee is lively, active and carefree. But neutering is a serious operation for a female. When she got back from the vet’s, she was far from herself. She was lying on the couch and clearly in pain, poor thing.

We’d had clear instructions that she wasn’t to run and she wasn’t to jump for a while. And let’s be clear: jumping includes using the stairs, for a little dog who has to leap from step to step.

‘I think I’ll sleep down here,’ Danielle said, ‘on the couch. That way Toffee can sleep next to me and, if she needs a pee during the night, I can take her out in the garden.’

It seemed a little rough on her to have to sleep on the couch but, in the circumstances, it made some sense. So I went up to our bedroom on my own while Danielle settled down on our (quite comfortable) couch, with both dogs next to her.

And so things might have stayed had Toffee not once more exercised her mighty will and her inalienable right to freedom of choice.

At 4:30 in the morning I was awoken by Danielle bursting into our room, distraught and panic-stricken. Though I’m glad to say that her first words suggested things were less bleak than they seemed.

‘Oh, thank God,’ she said.

Danielle was wearing an outdoor coat over her nightdress.

‘I’ve been hunting around the garden, looking behind every bush. I thought the pain had got too bad for Toffee and she’d crawled away to die somewhere quiet.’

‘But she hadn’t?’ I enquired, not yet fully conscious.

‘No. There she is.’

I looked where Danielle was pointing. And there lay Toffee, curled as always into a little ball, lying against my leg. She had doubtless been asleep not long before, but she’d lifted her head to look and Danielle as though asking, ‘what’s all the commotion about?’

The explanation was simple. Toffee views the couch as a fine place to lie on, during the day, or even in the evening when we’re watching TV. It isn’t where we, and in particular Toffee, sleep. That happens two floors up, on a proper bed.

So, doctor’s orders or not, she’d jumped off the couch, made her way to the stairs and quietly but determinedly jumped up from step to step till she reached the top.

Where she’d made the further leap onto the bed and fallen asleep next to me. In what she clearly regarded as the right place for it.

‘Well, if she’s sleeping up here, so am I,’ said Danielle. And climbed into bed.

Onto which Luci also promptly leaped. So we all four slept for the rest of the night on our communal bed. As we usually do.

Order had been restored to the universe. Things were once more the way Toffee likes them. And the way, ill or not, she was going to make sure they remained.