All by myself

Hi! Pippin the Gatekeeper here.

I’m all by myself today, because Mummy has taken Ronnie to the vet. And she thought he’d best go with Reggie to keep him company.

We had our usual check-up on Saturday. We sit on the scales and Mummy says numbers, and writes in her book. Then she checks teeth, ears and feels us all over. She’s looking for lumps, bumps, and uncomfortable spots. She says she checks our eyes and nose too, but just looks at those without needing to feel anything. Usually. Then she turns us so we’re sitting with our backs to her chest, and checks our bottoms and our feet. Then she makes notes. Usually it says either ‘all fine’ or ‘toes need doing’ which means toenails.

This Saturday Reggie and I went through as usual, but Ronnie took ages. First she weighed him four times, three in the usual place, and then she moved the scales and weighed him again.They all said the same: 951 instead of 1045 which is what it usually is. She checked him over again, but he wasn’t complaining about anything, although he wasn’t really interested in his cucumber. Well, that’s weird. So she made an appointment with Dr Rebekah for this morning. Urgent, but not emergency, she said.

I asked her if she had any theories. She said it might be his teeth, and that was most likely. But he seemed to have a very round tummy for someone losing weight, so there might be something else. He’s not eating his vegetables, and he took a little soft food, but won’t eat Rescue food. But he’s eating a little hay, and when Mummy gave him Readigrass yesterday he went straight for that. He also ate the grass Mummy brought in from the garden. And that makes her think it might be something to do with his teeth, or his tummy.

So I’ll tell you what Dr Rebekah said next week.

In other news, we’ve had some funny birds in the garden. There were some ducks that flew in and landed on the flooded ground at the bottom of the garden. Mummy says it’s quite deep after all this rain, but it will soak away in time. There have been unusual small birds on the seed feeder, but they came last year too, siskins and redpoll. And yesterday there was a thump on the window, so Mummy looked out to see if a bird had collided with it, and saw a Red-legged Partridge inspecting the flower border for food! Then it walked off towards the flooded patch. Mummy took a picture. She said it’s miles away from where it should be, which is on farmers’ fields and open hills.