Before and after ...

Maxi, the WonderDog, has been sporting uncharacteristically long hair recently. Given his Easter trip up to the snowy mountains of Andorra I didn't have the heart to trim his furry pyjamas in case he caught a chill, so he's been looking like a bit of a hippy.

He was very happy with this au natural look. Like his owner, he's not really into high-maintenance grooming, but in the warm spring sunshine of the Costa Brava it was all getting a bit too much.  So off he went to the canine beauty parlour on Saturday for a short back and sides. I breezed off leaving him with the doggy stylist, little thinking of the Titanic struggle that would ensue.

Difficult? Me? 

For reasons that are not totally apparent he's happy to have the region around his gentleman bits trimmed and scissored and shaved with that rather alarming hand-held machine that sounds like a dentist's drill, but the moment anyone goes near his ears he goes ballistic. It's sort of like Elvis and Don't step on my blue suede shoes, only in his case it's more along the lines of Don't go anywhere near my hairy ears. 

I came back after the allocated couple of hours expecting to find a ship-shape Schnauzer all ready to go. Instead I found an exhausted doggy stylist tied up in knots with a small black dog who wouldn't let her go anywhere above his neck. Honestly the view through the window was like something out of a Marvel cartoon strip.  She asked me to help, and between us we managed to get the territory up north trimmed into something that vaguely resembled the beard and Leonid Brezhnev eyebrows of a proper Schnauzer-about-town.

This is how he looks now:

This is totally my beach

And, yes, he's acting like he's the dog in charge of the beach. We've got a theory that once he pees on something he thinks he owns it ...

All the best for now,

Bonny x