Nobody Will Ever Guess You Are A Dog

by Peter Thomas

my brother and I were born a week early on the sofa, and the rest of my siblings arrived during the next few hours in a more appropriate place. Both the scene in the film and the unanticipated location of my birth have foreshadowed aspects of my life which I will disclose in due course.

Banoffee of Beechwood may sound a rather unusual name, but then I am a spaniel and my fur is indeed toffee and banana coloured. Nowadays most people know me as Sophie. Nobody has ever explained to me why my humans sometimes forget and call me Squiggle or Squigmeister, although when we were puppies they used to refer to me and my brothers and sisters collectively as the Squeakies, which we thought was rather rude.

I was born on the last Sunday of April 2015. My human daddy was watching Indiana Jones and it was in the very loud bit with the tank when he noticed squeaking coming from across the room. There was a whelping box prepared for my pregnant true Mum Poppy, but she insists she never got the memo. So

I was around 4 weeks old when I agreed to remain with my true Mum and her human family on the condition that they changed my name. They would have sounded so silly going around the park shouting “Banoffee! Banoffee!” In gratitude they chose a name derived from the Greek word for wisdom – entirely appropriate. Our humans had always said they would only ever be a one dog family, on the grounds that on a scale from 1 to 10 of bounce, spaniels come in at 11. Two spaniels make a liveliness factor of 11 squared. But I charmed them, and they have managed to survive with us both – somehow.

Our human mummy is a schoolteacher and Poppy and I have always helped her work by going in and meeting her children, letting them stroke us and showing off our training skills and tricks. Our human daddy is a clergyman and we help him by going to meetings where our friends who love dogs but don’t have their own feed us with biscuits and cake under the table. But we only really came into our own during the very sad times of lockdown when people started communicating using Zoom. Our unexpected appearances made online classes much more exciting and we feel our contributions to online sermons were very helpful, especially the time I joined in at full volume just as he was explaining the meaning of “Howlellujah”.

We found great inspiration in the Texas lawyer who appeared in court using a kitten filter on his video. At the same time we came into possession of some ground-breaking “woof-to-text” software. You can imagine how tedious it had been up until then typing with our tongues. We obtained our own dog-sized laptops and since then the world has been our Sausage Sandwich. We have proved that it is completely true what they say. Turn on “woof to text” and use a “human” filter. Nobody will ever guess you are really a dog! Which is how I will be delighted to share my adventures with you.

Married to Ruth, Peter Thomas is a very happy father, grandfather and spaniel owner. He has published three non-fiction books and is delighted to assist Sophie in her creative writing projects. Peter retired in 2023 after 36 years as a Minister of local Baptist Churches - he was originally a teacher of chemistry and computing. He looks forward to spending more time with family and friends, playing piano and guitar, and walking by the sea. He continues to add to his blog of more than a thousand sermons and reflections found at www.pbthomas.com.