​My first doggy friend as a little girl was “Tan” Guiry, the dog belonging to our lovely shopkeeper neighbour, Bridgie, three doors up on Mass Road.  At that time everyone kept their front door wide-open and, whenever he wanted, Tan would stroll down the road, cross our threshold step polished red by Peggy and stick his head around our inside door to see if I would play.  

​This week 20 years ago, I was going through trauma.  On 13th of April 2004 – it seems like yesterday - my (then) 75 year-old mother, Peggy, collapsed in the kitchen at home in Carrick while making the tea for my dad, Mickey.  In my lifetime up ‘til then, none of our small family of 4 had ever been in hospital.  Peggy had bad health early on in their marriage with the loss of her first 5 babies, she had had a tubercular gland removed from her neck in the early fifties and had suffered bad headaches when Martin was a baby that was put down to neuritis.  But nothing since I was born.
 
So, it was a huge shock to get the phonecall in Dublin that she had been taken to Waterford Regional Hospital (now WUH) by ambulance with a suspected sub-arachnoid brain haemorrhage (SAH).  The neighbours on the road had been wonderful in picking her up and calling the ambulance.  Peggy had gashed her head off the cooker.  It was the Tuesday after Easter and I had been down visiting home over the weekend.  She hadn’t been feeling 100%; feeling nauseous and headachy so I had picked up flu remedies at the pharmacy. I can’t describe the shock my 89-year-old dad Mickey, my brother Martin and I felt to see a woman that was always so fit and healthy completely knocked out.  

​So, as many of you know, Charlie has a cute little doggie called Benji.  And we are all mad about him.  What you might not know is that before Benji, there was another dog….. called Fido.  And before Elf on The Shelf was a thing, there were the Fido Fotos!