Sid. I heard his name, and I knew the deal was done. It’s funny how names work, isn’t it? They give you a feeling.
It’s like that with your children too- yes, Tommy works. He definitely looks like a Tommy! (we all understand each name has a very specific look that we can’t know until we see it)- except you aren’t picking your children up from strangers who’ve advertised them on the internet, although that would probably be easier.
Not usually anyway.
We ran through the necessary names. There’s Darwin of course. And Gordon, Darwin’s friend. And then Stanley, our dearly departed, who most definitely sent him.
Sid, Sid, Sid. You have to let it roll around your tongue. Sid, Sid, Sid, Sid, Sid.
So, one of my dearests, Tania, set off across the hills of Scotland towards Inverness and as I lay in bed, I imagined her journey like a little animation in my mind. Darwin was in the back seat of course, pressing his wet doggy nose up against the window. Probably sleeping a little. Snuffling a little. Hopefully not farting because that’s atrocious when one is trapped inside a car.
And Tania would be chattering to him and telling him of their adventure, and Darwin- like all impending siblings- would be unsure, and they would both sing and wind down all the windows until it got slightly too cold and then they’d wind them up again.
And then they would arrive, and we would hope that it’s not a house that you are scared to knock on the door of, with people who look like they might grind you up and put you in in a sandwich making you completely untraceable, but rest assured, lovely reader, it was not.
Or at least, if it was, Tania did not tell me much about it. And she’s not inside a sandwich, so there’s that.
So now there is Sid, and he is home, and he has landed, paws upright, with his people.
There’s something about the words ‘he’s a little thin’ that makes you equate that precisely with the love, and the lack thereof, and at that point, a human’s heart spills over.
And you are, of course, forced to feel nothing but the surge of absolute loveliness for a creature who has come from being not-that-wanted who will now know nothing but love. Sid, Sid, Sid, and all the doggy love.
What could be a greater happiness than that?
To be found and loved and wanted.
Sid, Sid, Sid, Sid, Sid.
Sid of the Lochs. Sid of Bonny Scotland. We salute you.
xx Jane
Tania sent me a photo and of course, I had to draw them. She wasn’t in the photo I was sent, but I added her in. Sid and Darwin and their people.