I write this in the hope of making you laugh not cry. Wiglet was all about happiness….

When we first got Wiglet she was called Iona – she was never an Iona in a million years. The people had nicknamed her squiggles and we duly started to call her that. But it was the name for a cute, cuddly handbag type dog, and it’s fair to say that we came to realise fairly quickly that Wiglet was never that!

On the second day we had Wiglet she got out of our garden (cue an order to a well known large delivery company for over 400 fence pegs!!!). She was off across the fields surrounding our house in seconds. RD had to climb over our fence to go after her as to go through the gate would have taken too much time, and her little, cute Welshie arse was disappearing fast over the horizon.

RD eventually found her because something had caught her interest in the bushes and she came out to him. He didn’t realise what that something had been until he picked her up and got covered in the delight known as foxes shit that she had rolled in – we would go on to learn that this was in fact a spa treatment to her! And so her first name was born: Foxes shit and Twiglets.

Only a few days later the next name that would be born started to present itself. We had taken both of the Welshies for a walk in Mayenne and were walking down the steps on the outside of the castle wall. Wiglet was slightly ahead of me and off she went, rounded a corner for a second before reappearing with a startled pigeon in her mouth! I was an even more startled mummy! I made her drop the pigeon (which lived to see another day) but we soon came to realise after she had killed a rabbit that she was a natural hunter, unlike Harley.

Initially she chased our younger cats mercilessly, she would wait by the door for the cat flap to make a noise and would speed out like a mad thing. The first Christmas she cornered our youngest cat and all hell ensued as the cat escaped her, breaking glasses and crockery all over the cooked turkey.

She had been born from French hunting stock. As the years passed she went on to kill a rabbit only weeks later that had stepped one foot inside our huge garden. Over the years the murdering spree continued with rats,mice, hedgehogs (I know I hated it), a vole, and some of our chickens adding to her toll. Her second name was born: ‘The Serial Killer’. But then she would look at you with that pretty innocent face…

She loved a cushion my baby. She had come from a place where she either lived locked in a room, or in an outside pound. After coming to live with us she quickly realised that she shared mummy’s love of cushions. She slept on a huge pile of them at the side of our bed in France.

She would climb up as many as she could, eventually she made her home in an antique French cot (why not!) where all my clean throws were folded. It rocked, but it didn’t deter her, and she would climb in with ease and snore. It used to really annoy Harley that he could not get in it because he was bigger than her and could not get the balance right.

Due to her love of piles of cushions I would call her my princess and the pea, after the fairy tale where the princess lay on many mattresses. By 2018 she had become Princess and Dylan had become her Pea. They are together all over the woodpiles on Rainbow Bridge as we speak.

Now as you have probably guessed Wiglet was no ordinary little dog. She was always into something. She literally wiggled everywhere, and was often into mischief. There was the time that she literally fell into the cesspit in our house in France, or the time that Harley was Ill when she escaped her harness and wiggled off down the corridor that led to the cat’s ward at the super-vet hospital. Or when she would stand on the garden table staring in the window because she wanted to come in. As a result RD would sing ‘Sweet Dream or a Beautiful Nightmare’ to her. Harley was the sweet dream, she was the beautiful nightmare. Another nickname from her beloved Dad Dad.

Over the short almost seven years she lived with us, she mainly became known as ‘Wub Wub’ because we truly wubbed (loved) her. She always answered to that one…..and we will always ‘wub’ her.

Rosie