The Amorous Double-Life of a Draft Excluder

For the main part of his useful existence, the stuffed velour snake, that we came to affectionately know as Snaky, served his intended use as a draft excluder.

Snaky came into our lives after we moved into Number 10 The Links, our third and final family home in a small housing estate next to Blackmoor Golf Club in Hampshire, England. The double doors to our living room, thanks to some optimistic carpentry, had a huge gap under them which needed filling to keep us warm in the winter months.

Snaky duly entered service in the winter of 1985.

The early part of his life was unremarkable as he flopped around in the hall, often kicked into action on chilly nights, but otherwise ignored. His was a lonely existence.

It was only when Rhubarb, a hugely charismatic Spaniel/Labrador cross, arrived on the scene as a bounding twelve-week-old puppy that things got interesting for Snaky.

Rhubarb had joined our family as our beloved Border Collie, Timmy, was entering his twilight years. Timmy was not overly impressed by this new addition that insisted on snuggling up next to him, but over time he developed a grudging acceptance of Rhubarb’s presence. Whilst Timmy had been a wonderful dog, a loyal companion with whom my brothers and I had grown up with, Rhubarb possessed another level of personality entirely. He was what you might call, in human terms, ‘a bit of a character’.

Rhubarb was into everything.

He would break out of the house and venture far and wide, often only recovered when we received a familiar phone call, ‘we’ve got your dog’. At one such home, when we arrived to collect him, he had displaced the family Rottweiler and, having eaten its dinner was found curled up in its bed. The Rottweiler looking on mournfully.

He ate his way through our house, his diet including a TV remote control, the cat’s dinner, half a telephone (this followed a memorable occasion in which he managed to phone my best friend Paul. Having answered his phone, Paul heard a serious of low growls and a sound very similar to a dog chewing on the receiver. The conclusion was that Rhubarb had managed to dislodge the receiver, hit redial and engage in a short conversation with Paul before ringing off by treading on the phone’s cradle. You can imagine my surprise when Paul informed me that my dog had phoned him earlier that day) and finally, Rhubarb’s culinary high point, was the consumption of my Mum’s HRT tablets.

The whole pack.

I am not sure that my Mum would have noticed, were it not for Rhubarb developing a certain sashay to his walk in the days that followed.

The effects did eventually wear off, but whether this unintended hormone boost contributed to his later fixation with Snaky remains to be seen.

And so it was, with his Puppy passions stirring and his supercharged hormones aflame, that Rhubarb turned his attentions to Snaky.

He was a young male dog, and he needed to get some practice in, if he was to sire as many puppies as Timmy had managed (some planned, some purely opportunistic) and a long foam-filled draft excluder turned out to be the perfect shape to wrap his legs around, in order to practice his thrusting action.

Snaky did not object, and so began the second half of his life, an impassioned time at the mercy of Rhubarb’s frequent fits of lust, in which he proved to be a willing, if slightly passive accomplice.

The affair went on for several years until Snaky split his side and his emerging foam innards began to disrupt Rhubarb’s rhythm. Rhubarb moved on without so much as a backward glance, such is the way of dogs.

But Snaky was not complaining, the consensus was that these were best years of his life.

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This post was previously published on The Memoirist.

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