One of the things I've found as a Beastly Beast is that we often get to stop and talk to loads of people when we are out and about - even on our normal walks like, particularly at weekends; today was one of them days and a couple of things happened that I'd like to tell you about.

The first one is about a couple who stopped and had a chat with us. They told us we were all lovely (don't want to sound too big headed, but that's not so unusual) and that they thought what happened to greyhounds was awful (luckily that's not so unusual either these days). What was unusual, but really nice, is they said that their grandson had met a load of greyhounds and lurchers when they came to his Scout night earlier in the year and he reckoned that they were all really brilliant and he wanted one. 'Course we asked which Scout Group he was with and it turned out, as you've probably guessed already, it was the 49th Northampton and that the brilliant hounds was us - wicked!! Nice to know the kids enjoyed it.

The other one happened as we were on the way back to the Beast Bus. We were walking back from the Tree Top walk to the café (for those of you that have been to Salcey) when we came up behind a couple of human ladies and their puppies. They were wandering along blissfully unaware of seven hounds behind them when one of the puppies turned round and let out a little scream; turned out she was petrified of dogs. The two ladies however wanted to talk to us and the other puppies came and said hello. And here's the magic - after a bit the scared puppy came over too and started to stroke us; no-one asked her, she just did it. And next thing you know she's giving us hugs and strokes and has decided that dogs aren't so bad after all - much to the amazement of her mum who reckons she's never done anything like that at all. Even when the other lady visits with her dog this young lass wouldn't go near, yet for some reason she decided we was nice. She promised that she would stroke the other ladies dog too. And when we wandered off all the puppies - except the one in the wheels - ran along with us and when we got the car park we had to wait for their mums to catch up.

I got back to the Beast Bus with a funny but nice feeling in my tummy; it's was nice to know that our visit to the Scouts really did go OK (adult humans are polite which means they say nice things even if they don't really mean it, but human puppies always tell it like it is), and to get a little girl not to be scared of dogs was great.