HEY Ludo fans - wondering what our dog has been up to lately?

Well, not a lot really.

I haven’t written about our dog for a while mainly because he’s settled into a rather lovely routine of sleeping, eating, and charging about woods.

Occasionally he’ll have a go at chewing his blanket but even then that’s pretty much him saying, come on you’ve been out for at least ten minutes, let’s play for a while.

Other than that it’s been fairly uneventful because, I’m guessing, we’re finally out of that bonkers puppy phase.

The thing is - I’m kind of missing it.

The Beautiful Wife definitely doesn’t miss it at all, especially his love of landscaping our garden into some kind of quagmire that resembles a First World War battlefield.

Funnily enough she still has D-Day-type metal barriers up around the lawn to give the grass a fighting chance but with Ludo’s new laid-back approach to skipping around the garden we probably could take them down.

He saves the whizzing about for his occasional outings to the woods where he still charges around like a whippet on speed, although these bursts are shorter these days.

Ludo also still likes spreading himself out into puddles, the source of much amusement to other dog-walkers but kind of run-of-the mill behaviour to us.

And perhaps that’s it. Ludo is still bonkers, it’s just we’ve got used to it.

Take last thing at night when he decides it’s time for bed.

Usually around the middle of the Ten O’Clock News, Ludo’s head lifts up from his bed and he looks over at me.

I try not to return the look because that means acknowledgement, which in turn results in him getting up from his bed, stetching in that way dogs do, and then coming over to where I’m sitting.

That said, he’s got wise to me not looking, so now he just walks over and sits by my side anyway.

I usually tell him it’s too early to go to bed and that while I understand the Beautiful Wife may be curled up on the sofa opposite gently snoring, technically we’re not ready for sleep yet, we’re still listening to Huw Edwards telling us what’s been going on in the world today.

He doesn’t understand. He thinks that’s another acknowledgement so then lifts his paws up on to my knees with an incredibly straight back and stares at me much like a Meerkat does looking out for a predator.

At first this was kind of cute - now it’s just annoying. Although occasionally I do amuse myself by suggesting, very quietly, he may want to go and do the ‘Meerkat’ on the BW, which then wakes her up in an hilarious jolty, confused type manner.

Fortunately the BW hasn’t got wise to my part in this devious little scheme and so up until now the dog has always got it in the ear.

Anyway the point of telling you about Ludo doing the ‘Meerkat’ is that this is quite normal, boring behaviour, to us but when we have people round, we kind of set our watches to around 10 o’clock so we can show them his cutesy little habit.

Judging by the internet, surely that’s the whole point of having pets anyway!

NEIL D’ARCY-JONES

What My Kids Said This Week: “That man wants to be the President of the United States - scary!”