Peg o' my heart

6th April 2025

After the sunshine in Bologna last Sunday, we woke to rain again on Monday, a sign that our brief holiday was all but over. The only thing left was to collect Harry when the morning window for drop off and pick up opened at 11 a.m. He was as phlegmatic about our reappearance as ever and, like last time, his voice had gone awol, though it returned more quickly as he had not had quite as much time to wear it out.

It was back to normal on Tuesday, though it took the weather till Thursday to warm up, so much so that I was able to take Harry for our afternoon walk in shirtsleeves (me, not him) and the fire went unlit. It was back on the next evening though, not so much because it had turned colder, but because, for the first time in a very long time, Marco and Maddalena came to dinner. Now that we know Harry and Mia, if not bosom buddies, accept each other’s presence, Maddy felt ok bringing her to the house. We had a lovely evening, with a very good bottle of wine courtesy of Marco which served a double purpose in christening our new table mats.

Amongst last weekend’s purchases were four round, woven place mats from Zara Home, brought out for the first time and proving what a good buy they were for not only did they emerge unstained after Maddalena got distracted when topping her glass of wine with water and turned it into an indoor fountain, but the splashes and dribbles Marco managed when pouring had also vanished when we checked them the next day – fully dried out after Stephen’s speedy intervention.

And so we come to the really big news…

While we were in Bologna last week the topic of having another dog came up. We had agreed, after Bella, that the sensible answer was no, but eight months down the line it was time for a reassessment – partly prompted, I think, by how strange the house felt on the Thursday night with Harry in the kennel. It was soon obvious that both of us had had a change of heart and it didn’t take long to decide that yes, we would make our family one of four again.

Our agreed criteria were that it would be female, a rescue dog, not big and not a puppy. Well, we almost got there, but these things are not like ordering a pizza, so hitting three out of four, or maybe three and a half because she is not that big, is allowable when the heart comes into play.

We had decided that La Casa degli Animali, Uniti per la Coda, in the countryside near to Morrovalle, would be the place to start, which, according to their Facebook page, was open to callers on Saturdays and Sundays from 14.00 to 17.00 so two o’clock saw us standing at the gate, pressing the buzzer while Harry waited in the car and we waited until the woman on duty sauntered over to give us a quick interrogation through the bars. We just about passed I think, and as another party arrived just after us, she opened the gate and let us all in.

Immediately by the entrance was a small pen with five puppies scrambling at the fencing, while the mother hovered in the background. They were waiting to be adopted and the mother, who the woman said was about three, also needed a home.

We parked that information and took a look round the rest of the kennels, but while there were a lot of very appealing dogs, they were all puppies, and so we went back to the mother. I fetched Harry while the woman took her from the pen so we could walk her round and get a sense of how the two would get along. They seemed fine together, though the mother was very wary of us, which is understandable, but seemed very gentle, an impression supported by the woman’s testimony. She had made a call while we were getting familiar and the boss person confirmed that the puppies were all weaned and the mother was ok to go.

It was then just a matter of saying yes, which we did, and that might make it seem like we took her because she was the only one available, but I prefer to think it was destiny; we wouldn’t have taken her if it hadn’t felt right. The decision made, the woman completed the necessary paperwork for change of ownership, and when I returned from taking Harry back to the car they had got to the stage of deciding on a new name as the kennel had just called her Mammina (Little Mother). “Choose a name,” Stephen barked, “beginning with ‘m’.” Well, I was a little flustered. I had, during the week, considered Minnie, but no way was she a Minnie, so I started listing any name I could think of.

“Don’t you have another aunty?” Stephen asked, adding to the pressure, as Bella was the name of one of my great aunts. Well, Margaret; that wasn’t right either but with pressure mounting I suggested Maggie, which Stephen liked and the woman liked and so she wrote it down. ‘Maggie’ was now ours, and after stopping to pose for a photo we got her in the car and headed home, leaving me to mither myself about the name. Maggie just didn’t seem snuggly enough, especially when Thatcher entered my head as well, and after thinking aloud for a while I came round to Peggy, another diminutive of Margaret, and more cosy we felt. And so, Mammina is now Maggie officially, but to those who love her she’s Peggy.

And how has she fared since she arrived at her new home? Pretty well, I think we can say. She was tentative about coming up and into the house, has kept a wide berth when we have got anywhere near, but a bit of bribery with dog biscuits has allowed us to get her lead on and to take her for her walks. She was very good this afternoon when we gave her a shower with ant-parasite shampoo and does seem to want to be in company with us, but a lot of things are obviously new and somewhat daunting for her. At least she has a role model in Harry, whom she has taken to following around, but whether that is a good or a bad thing, time will tell.