Published on 22 July 2007 at 02:55 pm
Filed in Expat Life In Nicosia Cyprus
When is a Weimaraner not a Weimaraner – well, when it has a big ginger belly, manky yellow eyes, a bald pink chest, bingo lips, bingo chins, hovercraft hips and attitude, possibly? And that’s about as fair a description as I can give of my dog Cheese and I got him from a registered Weimaraner breeder in Cyprus and everything!
But he looks nothing like the Weims on my calendar and behaves nothing like the Weims I read about on the internet…so this is the story of Cheese, my Weimaraner who has gone mad in Nicosia…
Once upon a time I fell in love with a beautiful Vizsla puppy, I thought it was a Weimaraner and after pestering himself non-stop for about 8 years he finally relented and said, ‘okay, so you can have a fricking Weimaraner if you can find one in Cyprus.’
Well, no sooner said than done, quick Google search ‘Weimaraner breeder Cyprus’ and up pops Vrachos who does dog breeding, ball room dancing and who has a nice line in related products and who also has a swimming pool and a running machine just for his dogs!
When Cheese was born he was the ugliest puppy in the whole world and it was at that point when I had already put down a deposit for him that I realised he wasn’t a Vizsla and that Weimaraners are not the same as Vizslas…oooops. But I was already smitten – he was the biggest, fattest puppy in the world, he was 3 times bigger than his siblings and he already had his adult sized skin at just 6 weeks old and looked just like a wrinkly stinky old man! He stomped across his brothers and sisters to get to his food and he made this sort of snuffling noise that was just adorable!
So I took Cheese home but he pooped under my bed, on my bed, on my shoe and by my desk…never mind, over the months I fell more deeply and deeply in love with this fairly foul smelling, silver haired, blue eyed monster…and I trained him to sit, and shake hands and wait for me and dribble a lot (actually he didn’t need to be trained to do that)…and then he began to grow into his silver coat and his eyes changed from blue to amber and….then…
Cheese stopped growing just short of his skin fitting him, his eyes went this sort of manky shade of wee-yellow and in the heat of the summer sunshine in Nicosia in Cyprus loads of his hair fell out and where he lies on his back and sunbathes to get his belly all tanned he’s gone ginger and his chest has gone all pink and crispy!
His face is all floppy, his lips all droopy, he has multiple wrinkly chins, his skin sags round his bum when he sits, his hips fold over the floor when he lies down like the cushions on a hovercraft and if he’s feeling in the mood he’ll come and start a fight.
In the winter months Cheese is a good dog, he has 3 walks a day and is content to spend the rest of the time asleep or eating, but right about now, in the middle of the long hot Cyprus summer he is a nutcase. We have the aircon on in the house while we work otherwise the computers would melt – so the dog is wide awake and wanting to play – but he can’t because it’s too hot. So we have this routine, he stands by the door and howls, I let him out, he dances round the garden because it’s too hot to put his paws down, he rolls on the grass, drinks from the pool, falls asleep in the sun, gets too hot, wipes his dribbly nose on every single pane of glass he can find trying to find a way back in to the air-conditioned sanctuary of the house, howls some more to get my attention and then flops down on the tiles for half an hour before starting the routine all over again!
As you can see the heat is affecting him and Cheese my Weimaraner has gone mad (and ginger – what’s that about) in Nicosia…
