The Day Buddy Declared War on the Postman (And Lost. Sort Of.)

Let me set the scene.

It’s a Tuesday morning. I’m sitting at my desk with a coffee, feeling very productive, very peaceful, very much like a person who has their life together.

Then the letterbox opens.

What follows can only be described as a full military response from a creature who weighs eleven kilograms and has ears that are frankly too big for his head.

Buddy launches himself off the sofa — which he is absolutely not allowed on, for the record — and tears across the hallway at a speed that suggests he has been training for this exact moment his entire life. There is barking. There is skidding on the tiles. There is a very undignified collision with the umbrella stand.

The postman, bless him, has already cycled three houses down and is completely unaware that he has just narrowly escaped the wrath of one extremely offended beagle.

Buddy stands at the front door for a full two minutes afterwards, trembling with righteous indignation, staring at the post that has now fallen on the floor as if it personally wronged him.

Reader, it was an electricity bill.

Here’s the thing about Buddy that I’ve come to understand after years of living with him: he is not actually aggressive. He is not fierce. He is not a guard dog by any stretch of the imagination.

He is, however, deeply convinced that he is the only thing standing between this household and total chaos.

Every day the postman arrives. Every day Buddy sounds the alarm. Every day the postman leaves, completely unharmed, and Buddy returns to the sofa (which he is not allowed on) with the satisfied air of someone who has done an excellent job.

The system works, as far as he’s concerned.

I think about this a lot when I write the Buddy books, actually. That gap between how Buddy sees himself — heroic, vigilant, essential — and how the rest of the world sees him — a small dog losing his mind over an electricity bill — is where most of the humour lives. But it’s also where something a little more real lives too.

Because isn’t that all of us, a little bit? Convinced our worries are enormous and urgent, while the rest of the world just cycles serenely past?

Buddy never reads the electricity bill, of course. He doesn’t know it’s not a threat. He just knows something came through that door that wasn’t there before, and he is not okay with that.

Honestly? Relatable.

Does your dog have an arch nemesis? A postman, a vacuum cleaner, a suspiciously shaped shadow? Tell me in the comments — I genuinely want to know.

And if you want more of Buddy’s very serious opinions on household security, he shares quite a few of them in Unleashed: Buddy’s Diary — available on Amazon now. 🐾