His name was Satan...
...but don't ask me why. We even chose that name for him, but he wasn't really evil so the real reason? I haven't a clue - I think it was my brother's idea. And yes, we were occasionally required to call out his name but only when absolutely necesarry because, well, it just looked silly. We weren't really a household that took religion seriously, you may realise.

Anyway, Satan was a jet-black, thick-as-fuck greyhound that my mum came home with one day. She used to breed and run dogs with my Dad before I came along, so she knew he had been dumped by a breeder probably because he was shit at running, or more likely past it as he wasn't a young dog even then.

I've posted about Satan before, when he wasn't quite called upon to save my mum from getting mugged. Linky

Like I said, he wasn't even remotely evil enough to earn his namesake, but he was more then a bit dim. Completely impervious to command of any kind, not to mention foresight. If you took him for a walk in the park then the moment you let him off of his lead he would bolt off in a random direction and usually not stop until he hit something. We got into the habit of pointing him at the fence at the back of the park so he wouldn't end up under a car. He always came back though - after about 20mins bounding about and crashing bodily into stuff he'd most often trot back and sit down next to you. Good thing because with him being a greyhound and all chasing him was a very frustrating experience, whether he was a bit crap amongst his peers or not.

I think he had no sense of smell either, purely because of some of the things he consumed - bear in mind here that greyhounds are ALWAYS hungry. We used to make camps out of old doors and such in the back yard in summer, and lit them with candles when it got dark. Satan ate our entire stock of them one day, at least a half-dozen of them. We weren't happy. It was foolish for any grown-up to allow lads our age access to things that make fire, so they were difficult to come by. We knew it was him because there were even teethmarks where he'd been trying to get to the drippings in the brick we were standing the candles in. He'd gotten most of it, too.

What else did he eat? Oh yeah, half of a day's laundry (mostly my mam's smalls as I recall lol) one day when the washing line fell off the pole and low enough for him to reach - our next-door neigbour caught him pulling them off the line and shooed him away from the rest. And once when my brother was farting about with this clapped-out old Honda cub motorbike, he drained the petrol once, At some point that evening our mum looked out of the window to spy Satan just finishing drinking the lot out of the pan under the bike. We kept him in the yard for two days in case he exploded or something.

He must have inherited some supernatural aspect though, as he never once appeared to suffer any ill-effect from any of these things he gobbled or guzzled. He may have been thick, but he had a titanium constitution.

We put him to sleep when old age started to get the better of him. He probably got that far because we were a lot more careful as to what he did and didn't have access to after the petrol incident - we really thought that would be the end of him.

daftbastardofathingsohewas :)
(thatblokeoverthere not quite as much an arsehole as I thought, Sun 10 Jun 2007, 13:02, Reply)