Jake & Celtic mythology

I had today's blip all planned out, I had the image pre visualised, the parking place worked out in advance, even the time of day for the right light selected. Stopped first to pick Catie up from college and there we were Jake and I, watching the world go by...when the world wasn't really going by.....with a camera. It was therefore inevitable that I should start taking pictures of the Jake, just to pass the time....and because he's irresistible...and then I found out what an amateur I am, the batteries ran out and I was not (of course) carrying any spares. So today's blip is yet another Jake portrait.

It does give me the chance though to share a recent discovery about my canine companion. I thought i knew everything there was to know about my life partner but it turns out he has been keeping a secret about his very nature. We adopted him, from a horrible run down animal sanctuary, when he was 10 months old. In the absence of any information to the contrary I assumed he was a mongrel, a Heinz 57 as I'm wont to describe him. I have a huge soft spot for mongrels, always have had but particularly since spending many happy years with Jake's predecessor, my beloved Dylan who died about a year before I met Jake. So in other words breed is not an issue with me and dogs, doesn't make any difference. That said I have found it fascinating to discover in the last week or two that Jake isn't a mongrel at all, he is in fact an Australian Kelpie. This came to light via an encounter in a pub between Jake's best canine friend and playmate Bramble - who is a slightly shorter brown & tan version of Jake - and a passing Western Australian veteran sheep farmer ( you meet all sorts in Oxfordshire pubs). Said Australian greeted Bramble like a long lost friend and pronounced him most definitely a Kelpie. I didn't spend years absorbing the precepts of Linnaean taxonomy just to accept the word of a lubricated, transient Antipodean and so naturally I did some checking about this breed I had never heard of....only to find that not only was Bramble clearly a member of the breed but so was Jake! In the course of checking all this out I also found that there are a couple of Kelpie breeders in the area so the source of these two dogs of the same breed ending up in the same small, local sanctuary is entirely credible.

So what? you may be wondering. Well so nothing really I suppose, as I said it doesn't make a hap' worth of difference about my relationship with Jake or anything else and I'm in no way a snob about dog breeds but I do love the idea that he's descended from Scottish collies taken out to Australia in the early days of the colony and then interbred with Dingoes - I just love that! I also love the fact the breed were named Kelpies by the Scots emigrant who established the breed as it now is. Being a Scot, to me Kelpies are wonderful supernatural creatures who come out of the sea, appear to be tame horses ...but when you get on them they turn their wild red eyes up to you and you find your hands entangled in their kelp like mane, your legs stuck to the sleek wet flanks and they take you on a mad gallop into the depths of the sea from which you will never return.... I've always loved Kelpie stories and now I've got one lying next to me!....did I mention they can also manifest themselves as irresistibly beautiful faerie women? Any time you like Jake!.....it does explain why he gets so excited when I take him to the beach....