It’s my favourite time of year! Damp, misty, rainy – it means only one thing! Lots and lots and lots of wonderful, lovely . . . . . MUD!!

I love mud, it’s great . . . and there’s loads of it on all my favourite walks at the moment.. I only need to be out for two minutes and I can be covered in the stuff – even when I’m only walking through the village on the footpath. If I go for an hour’s walk at Gallowflat where my friend Bethan lives I end up absolutely caked in it – all over my legs and chest and tummy with great big blotches of it on my tail and head too. There’s nothing better!

Actually, that’s not quite true: there is one thing that’s better . . . and that’s the affect my getting caked in mud has on Tim. That really makes me laugh!

He told me not long ago that he deliberately tries to take me on walks which he things are less muddy so it won’t be such an effort to clean me up afterwards.

Dream on Tim! I love mud! I can find it anywhere! And when I do find it, Tim gets very upset and mutters (or sometimes shouts) things like, ‘Max, do you really have to?’

It’s brilliant – makes the mud so much more enjoyable.

But the really good thing is spreading it all over the house when we get back. That’s particularly easy when Hilary has been for a walk with me as she doesn’t always wipe me down very well.

There are several tricks to getting it all over the house. The most important thing is to distract the humans so either they don’t get me properly wiped down or . . . and this is better really, they forget to shut me in the kitchen and I get to race around the house treading my dirty footprints all over the place before they can catch me. That really upsets Tim. Another trick is to sneak out of the kitchen when they’re not looking – but my best experiences have actually taken place in the kitchen itself.

Every now and again, Tim washes the kitchen floor – and these times are absolutely the best for a mud attack. But the most satisfying by miles happened a few weeks ago. He’d washed the floor a few hours before I came in from my walk and, since I was a bit muddy, Hilary had meanly shut me in the kitchen. About half an hour later Tim came into the room and saw my paw prints all over the floor. Since he’d just washed the floor, he went to get a cloth and crawled around on the floor wiping up the paw prints.

Now, here’s the good bit!! What he didn’t know was that I was following right behind him and . . . yes, you’ve guessed it, my paws were still dirty . . . so, as fast as he wiped up my paw prints, I made a whole load more right behind him!

It was SO funny!! I managed to keep going for ages before he noticed.

And when he did notice . . . well, he said some very bad words!! I just laughed and laughed!!