Guest blog post – a day in the life of Lily

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on February 12^th 2025.

Mary-Jane has invited me to write a blog for you this week. She says looking after me for ten days has been a roller-coaster ride (obviously this is a good thing) and that we should share the experience on the blog.

My name is Lily and I am a golden retriever puppy, now four months old. I live in the foothills of the Pyrenees in France with another retriever called Anya and two cats, Birdbank and Claude.

I have human house servants to feed me, take me out for walks, clear up after me and provide some entertainment when my animal playmates run out of energy or inclination. My previous humans have disappeared, I don’t know why or where they have gone, and now I have two new ones (Mary-Jane and Michael) looking after me. I prefer the old ones as I had them very well trained, but the new ones are slowly getting the hang of things.

So, what’s it like being a puppy? Well, life is fairly hectic. I wake up early and my first job is to rouse the servants so that they can let me out and feed me. I am now ‘house-trained’, which seems to be important to the humans, but only works if I am let out on a regular basis. A very regular basis. If I sit by the door and whine it means I need to go out NOW and the servants need to come running  and open the door immediately. Otherwise it gets messy.

Then I play with Saint Anya for an hour or so. I’m not sure why she is a saint, it’s a new word the humans started using not long after I arrived. My favourite game is to get a good mouthful of her tail when she’s asleep and try and pull her across the floor. She’s quite a bit bigger and heavier than me so it’s not working too well at the moment. However I am getting stronger every day so I reckon I’ll have this cracked in a few weeks .

When Anya runs out of energy the cats need to be chased around the dining room, my toys Octopus and Teddy need to be shaken to within an inch of their lives and the humans need to be reminded that they also have playtime duties.

All this playing takes its toll and so I will fall suddenly and deeply asleep at some point.

As soon as I wake up I’m ready for a walk. The outside world has so many things to distract a dog. Sticks to chew, stones and leaves to carry in my mouth, and everything needs to be sniffed, eaten or peed on. We have a selection of routes that we do regularly and they never get boring, although the house servants are a bit of a liability, always in too much of a hurry, always telling me off for eating ‘something I shouldn’t’. They’re missing the point completely as that is just what dogs do. We might meet some more humans on our walk, all of whom make a big fuss of me and tell me I am adorable. Then it’s back home and more playtime.

Then lunch, sleep and more play time. Then a walk, a sleep and more play time. Then dinner, more play time and perhaps an evening film. And then a final short walk for my ablutions and to bed.

And then it all begins again the next day. What a wonderful life!

So I hope that gives you an insight into the life of a puppy. Mary-Jane and Michael are leaving soon and I shall miss them, although I am looking forward to getting my original servants back. I had become very attached to them. Apparently Mary-Jane and Michael have no puppy of their own. Life must be incredibly quiet and I can’t imagine what they do with their time without dog duties. Perhaps they’ll come back and visit me some time when I’m bigger and have a whole new set of games to play……

So that’s goodbye from the adorable Lily and her equally loveable housemates – and goodbye from a slightly exhausted house-sitter. See you soon.

MJ