I have talked for over a year about the fish and the flowers at Lakmahal, self-indulgently I realized, as I noted three days ago in ending the Wednesday series. I have changed that to talking about travel, for I realized too that, while I had written much about travel since I started working actively on the blog after coronavirus struck, I had not written anything here about travels after 2022.

I had thought then about continuing with elemental nature in my house on Saturdays, combining fish and flowers as I had done when I first started writing about my garden at the beginning of of 2022. But that too I thought might sound repetitive after the concentrated posts of the past year. Though I continue fascinated at the changes that are rung in the different fish tanks, and the emergence of roses and lotuses again and again in different positions, that excitement cannot be shared continuously by others.

But I realized too that there was another element of life here that I had not talked about on the blog, and that is the canine, the dogs that live here and form an increasingly large part of my life. Toby was well settled at Lakmahal when I started working intensively on the blog, and in those days he was indeed much at the cottage, when moving between provinces was not allowed for some time.

He did not really feature on facebook either, but last year, when I acquired two new puppies, I started a series on facebook, called ‘My animals and other family’, to talk about them, and though that series also looked at the family in the widest sense, to include inanimate nature and also fish, the dogs have figured prominently on it, not least because one of them had puppies earlier this year. And so too they have figured in another series I began on January 1st called ‘Lakmahal Life’, taking on from writing about my gardens, for the two previous years, in accounts that were then taken up in the two blog series that began 60 weeks ago, on Wednesdays and Sundays.

But since the dogs did not figure here, I will now present them though I presume, now that it has been done once, I will be told when the series is getting tedious. I have given it a title that refers indeed to two new generations, the pair of puppies I bought almost exactly a year ago, and the generation of more puppies that took place at the beginning of this year.

I wrote when I started the first of the Facebook series that in my seventieth year the process of a retreat into privacy, which had started when coronavirus first raised its head, began to accelerate. The immediate cause was the acquisition of two new puppies, German Shepherds, the same breed as Toby, whom I have had now for over five years, the same breed as Ricky whom I had for nine years from 1998.

The pictures are of the two puppies the day after I got them, which was June 10th last year.