When you have a dog, there's a type of silence that can only be defined as suspicious. Perhaps it's akin to a parent's sixth sense: I seem to be able to distinguish between a somnolent silence and a seditious one. When these two were puppies, the latter invariably involved copious amounts of shredded toilet paper. Ever since The Great Underwear Ingestion Caper of 2014, when Arwen ate what turned out to be a very expensive pair of unmentionables and spent two days in intensive care, the instinct kicks in stronger than ever, and silences get investigated.

After a week of glorious heat, it's turned rainy and much colder. As in March-like weather. This morning, I was intending to take the dogs to the park and throw balls for them, but as I was rounding up dogs and balls and bags and everything else I needed just to get out the door, the skies opened and it bucketed down. Plans changed: winter coat (yes!), poncho and boots were donned, Soleil was put on a Gentle Leader (which she despises) and we went out for a boring old leash-walk. 

Arwen - who will gleefully and unthinkingly launch herself into frigid lake water at the first chance - hates the rain. She sags and sulks and dawdles. Soleil, meantime, swans down into the grass and smears her head along the ground in attempt to rid herself of the hateful headcollar, brushing against the shrubbery and inviting all of the mosquitos out to play, as I slap violently at my own body and say a word that rhymes with suckers.

I've been working on a nitpicky assignment for the balance of the day, and there came a point when the senses focussed on the fact that there was an odd silence and the dogs were nowhere to be seen. I tracked them down in the living room, where they were in the process of dismembering the rotund little toy known as ''Farty Sherlock''. There were fluffy white guts everywhere -along with two (mismatched) socks and a running shoe - and two grinning Labradors in the midst of it, intent on de-farting the top half of the toy. Clearly they had seen the need to make their own rainy-day fun.

The little sock monkey in the pictures is a bookmark, a Christmas gift that I received last year. It's a nightly ritual: as soon as I take it out of the book and place it on the bedside table, Arwen sets a mission of acquiring it, simply because it is not allowed. She's relentless about it, and more times than not she does end up absconding with it, but only, it seems, to have the satisfaction of the theft. I caught her today with it, at the top of the stairs. Unlike Sherlock, it lived to tell the tale...

(in all honesty, I am every bit as bored as they are today, and their antics were a welcome distraction.)