Sorry to hear this Moot. All hail Brambo!

Big hugs to you and Bramble.
He certainly was the king of the pets thread and as rouj says he'll be surely missed by all of us.

Indeed.

Ah shit. What an absolute legend... Sorry to hear Moot. Big hugs to you and your family

Thinking of him and you and your family a bit today, Moot. Stay strong x

Virtual hugs to the Moot family.

Had the big oaf on my mind a lot today, he'll be dearly missed but the memories will always be here, and those memories are great. Happy to hear things went with kindness.

Bye Bramble, Companion of quality.

Lovely stuff.  Some pics from today:








And also something I wrote for no-one after a mini stock a couple of years ago that seems fitting as it's a tale of Badgers 'n Bramble so it can see the light of day.  Bit long, sorry:




It's a Saturday afternoon.  I set foot in my local hipster drinking emporium with my ageing Labrador to meet my internet friends.  He's a forum celebrity on thebearandbadger.co.uk; a legend in his own lifetime that can only be glimpsed in the flesh if my company is suffered too.  They know about the time he ate a tramp turd.  They're familiar with his penchant for eating candles, poisoned cat sick and a giant novelty Pannetone.  They applaud his grumpy face, paste his visage onto in-joke memes, send him Christmas presents and lol at videos of him listening to classic reggae upside down.  To me, he's Bramble (full name: Bramble McNulty Walnuts); to the badgers he's John Brambo.  I don't remember the inception of this nickname, but the moniker has stuck.  They also know he's old and infirm, which was a perfect excuse to get everyone to travel to a pub within half a mile of my front door. Well played, Moot_Geeza  of Brambo's owner fame.  

I arrive first.  The pub is fairly busy.  I spot an unoccupied table to the right of the bar, next to a table occupied by a square faced gentleman reading a red top.  At a glance I'd peg him in his late fifties.  As I walk over he stoops to fuss Bramble with gusto and we become dog chums.  Of course he doesn't mind minding him while I buy myself a drink.  Would he like a pint?  No thanks, he's just got himself a fresh one.  Amicable as fuck.  Minutes later I return with a Constellation IPA and conversation begins in earnest.  Meet Jim, ladies and gentlemen, who refers to himself as Big Jim.  The chinwag kicks off with a discussion on the pub itself, a previous shithole of epic proportions that's been forcefully metamorphosed - with Lotto funding! - into a one-stop hipster haven.  It's still a pub, but it's also a restaurant, a music venue and a cinema.  And it's absolutely glorious.  I once sat in the pub when it was just a boozer, and found myself swept up in a down with this sort of thing petition to stop the redevelopment, which for my sins I actually signed.  "They want to turn it into a fucking cinema with more than four drinks on tap!"   A fleeting win for peer pressure, but the petition was wholly unsuccessful and just look at it now.  Dogs are allowed in for a start.  Big Jim doesn't share my enthusiasm, but that's fine.  Life would be dull if everyone was on the same page wouldn't it?  Especially the one he was ogling as I arrived.  "He needs a drink.  Why don't you get him some water" suggests Big Jim, pointing at my canine companion.  Good point well made, I head to the bar to ask.  As the barman is occupied with other customers I politely cut in with an apologetic air finger and a quick "sorry mate, would you be able to get the dog some water when you get a sec please?".  Of course he wouldn't mind, it's a dog friendly pub and being friendly to dogs is one of the things they do.  I return to Jim safe in the knowledge that doggo liquid is on the way.  "Did you get it?" asks Jim, who seems oddly confused by the invisible water bowl I assume he thinks I might be carrying.  I explain that they'll bring it over in a sec, as they usually do in fairness (minus any prompting).  "It's not a waitress service is it?" offers Big Jekyll, apropos of not being obeyed.  I point out Bramble will be fine waiting, as I know he won't drink it anyway.  "I'll get it then shall I?" says Jim, poorly miming 'man almost about to stand up from his chair'.  "There's no need", I protest, but no - battle lines have been drawn as he's now fully upright.  He sashays over to the bar like a Peaky Blinders omnibus and eventually bowls back over with a bowl, which despite spirited cajoling Bramble proceeds not to drink from.  Lol.  After he thumps his posterior down with deliberate force, clearly feeling like some sort of subservient water carrying lackey, conversation commences at such speed it takes a man as perceptive as myself to realise that it's more of a wall of noise than a two way street.   It turns out Big Jim was a fairly naughty young man in his younger days, enjoying a good punch-up and drinking to excess.  One such altercation happened right here in this very establishment.  A fight with the 'big fucker' landlord, who must've been a meat-pawed behemoth to be described as such by a man who describes himself as Big Jim.  I assume Jim's shrunk a smidge since his no-salad days as I'd peg him in the upper percentile of medium, but he could still stop a pig in a passage with relative ease.  In fairness to Jim, he had caught the landlord pouring slops into a ninety year old war veteran's pint glass.  Not a regular, just a punter who walked in from the street.  In case you're wondering - like I was - how Jim knew he was a war veteran, he was wearing [checks notes] all of his medals to the pub.  And - as Jim clearly knows the devil's in the details - they were all polished and shiny.  And the landlord had decided to pour slops into his beer because.....oh right, this story is bollocks isn't it?  There's a lot to unpack from a limited number of sentences, but I guess the TL,DR, as we say on the internet, is as follows a) he's good at fighting and he used to box.  I know this because he's already told me twice. b) he looks out for the elderly and definitely won the fight with the landlord, receiving a lifetime ban for his heroics. c) his lifetime ban must've expired and, reading between the lines, D) I need to know that he can beat me up.  Aha!, one of my non internet friends has arrived.  Nice to meet you Jim*

*now fuck off please.  I'm off to the bar to order a posh burger.

Real friend - Alex - sits to my right, so you'd assume that's the end of Jim, given that he's sitting to my left at a different table and I've turned my back on him like a disgruntled Paul Cicero.  Jim assumes otherwise, and continues to talk at me with his one-man good cop bad cop routine for the next fifteen minutes.  We laugh at each other's jokes and stories - Henry Cooper once gave him some boxing tips, he once got really drunk and had to play football drunk in the field over the road (which eventually led to drunken fisticuffs), plus other scintillating slice-of-life tales.  Including this belter: Jim's mum once gave 'a very rich paki' from his school (whose name escapes him, but of course he has a guess anyway) fifty pence.  The key points seem to be the child's ethnicity and the fact that he'd only asked for twenty pence.  This resulted in him and his rich family buying Jim's mum expensive Christmas presents every year since.  So that's roughly fifty years of Harrods hampers for an investment of 50p.  He looks at me like he believes this actually happened and doesn't seem to know it's the sort of anecdote Martina Cole would start to write then scrunch up and throw at the bin.  I consider telling him the one about the impoverished woodsman who shared his slice of potato pie with a leprechaun after the other lumberjacks had refused to let him have any of their massive gamey pies, but I can't quite remember the intricacies of the parable.  Occasionally we agree with things I assume we don't completely agree on, but we both know that The Water Bowl Incident isn't sitting right with him, to the point where it's refluxing through his core and probably annoys him more at this moment in time than the tardiness of Brexit.   I've only spoken to Alex the real friend twice by the time my food arrives.  "Burgertime!", I exclaim.  At least one of my internet friends would know that's a loose reference to a Data East arcade game from 1982, but they're not here yet and Jim probably calls videogames bib bib bobs.  I'm eating now, and talking to Alex, so again it wouldn't be outlandish to assume that Jim's participation in my life is over.   "Are you going to eat that burger, in front of your dog, without giving him half?".  Oh Christ, he's found a grievance to snick the lockjaw on.  I point out the dog has been disastrously unwell for the majority of the year, which to my mind is an excuse so cast iron it could be erroneously described as literally the opposite of my elderly Lab's guts.  It's also true, and he's been given no scraps of any description for three months, given that anything other than his standard dog food eventually finds its way onto my laminate flooring.  The vet can't get to the bottom of it, despite the fact that he's been in and out repeatedly since it started.  Aside from all this, I've also spent most of his life pleading with Brams not to beg - or scrounge, as I say to dogs - while humans are eating.  He's quite good at it.  I wouldn't say he's completely mastered it, but I would say I've done a bang up job all things considered and I'm quite proud of my efforts.  Big Jim's slack mouthed scowl reveals how genuinely shocked he is that I haven't ripped off half of my £12 burger and laid it on the ground.  This is it, he's hanging his flapcap on this.  Throughout my entire burger Jim attempts to alpha me into feeding it to Bramble.  I quickly decide it's burger first, so I tuck in.  The byproduct of this is that the chips are piling up on Jim's shoulder as the quarter pounder disappears.  Seemingly undeterred, Jim now can't believe I've done that, rather than not being able to believe that I won't do it.  Again, it boils down to obedience, of lack of.  In an unexpected roll of the (presumably not ten-sided) dice, Jim's on his feet again, attempting to buy Bramble his very own burger from the bar.  I've got no choice other than to intervene now, so all of a sudden I'm up too, telling the bar staff that honestly, there's no point in making the dog a Fellowship & Star burger as I won't feed it to him.  They seem to understand this far quicker than Jim, who is again perturbed by losing another skirmish in the tunnel.  "If you love someone" he tells me, "if you really love someone, would you sit across the table from them and let them watch you eat while they get fuck all?"  It seems that I would, as I just did, but as I'm trying to think of the deftest possible way to point this out a member of staff emerges from behind the bar, brandishing a jar of dog treats.  Not Scotch Eggs.  Not pork pies or a plate of chilli con carne, but an assortment of dry goods that look like bones or slightly more cylindrical fig rolls.  He's trying to help, but the spiel about Bramble not being fed anything other than his own dog food at the moment is true, so I explain it again.  Remarkably, this man is not only satisfied with my explanation, he's also mildly apologetic and cocks his head to one side, pulling a poor you face at Bramble.  The 'poor you' isn't misplaced either - have you ever seen a dog vomit?  They don't like it, and they definitely don't like it happening, on average, once every other day for somewhere approaching 100 days.  Jim nonchalantly storms off to the loo, and I take the break in play to discuss with Alex what an utter cunt I think he is (Jimbo), and how hopefully he'll fuck off soon because it's getting a bit much.   Alex agrees, having been on the periphery entertaining himself with his phone for a good 25 minutes, and points out that these things would be infinitely easier if someone could commit to being either a dickhead or not a dickhead, rather than a bit of both. 

Suddenly, a couple of internet people enter from stage left.  I've met them both before.  Introductions are made as only one of them has met Alex, and conversation starts to flow.  Jim returns to the table to my left, but he's out the game for now.  For the next 45 minutes we're only at intermittent loggerheads.   I take solace in the realisation that he looks like a slightly younger version of the main character from UP.  Except Jim's wife didn't get Alzheimer's and die, she moved to Spain with his best friend (okay, this one was a great story, 10/10.  I particularly loved the way he told it to elicit lols, but when the lols arrived he managed to take umbrage at how funny I found it anyway - was it only supposed to land as a 7/10?).  It's a shame though, I expect he was a very loving husband and never gave her a single reason to leave him, like punching her for disobedience, or eating more than half of a plate of food.  He's still discombobulated by burgergate but he's started to add the phrase 'don't take this the wrong way if I'm speaking out of turn' whenever he mentions it (so he does understand, on some level, that he's incessantly talking out of turn).  Part of me wants to decimate his toxic masculinity by telling him that I would've hunted the backstabbing pal to the ends of the earth; if he went to China I'd pop up in his bowl of egg and chips if necessary, but instead I opt for platitudes and jokes about him making a meal out out of the burger business.  Jim slaps my thigh, but it's more of a thump really.  In footballing terms, he's just letting me know he's there.  He's pleased as Punch now, or to be more specific, as pleased as Punch before the final backhander prompted Judy to elope with the crocodile.  I'm finally allowed to drift back to the people I want to be talking to, and Jim strikes up a conversation with himself.  More forumites arrives.  The highlight of the day up to this point is when one of the badgers asks if Jim is joined to the forum (we do have a Darth Jim, but he's a Jehovah's Witness with a Calvin & Hobbes avatar), and I have to explain that he's just a stranger who seems to have latched on for the day.  Over the course of the next hour or so, as we're discussing the sort of things a group of functioning nerds like to discuss (Chernobyl, Madonna, whether the headphone port on the soon-to-be-released Sega Megadrive Mini will be purely decorative), Jim slips into what might be described as 'a bit of a bad way'.  He tries to let a bouncer know that he knows about muscles and fighting and suchlike by commenting on how his muscles must be handy in a pinch.  The bouncer couldn't be less interested in the conversation so Jim goes back to talking to MetaJim, and occasionally me.  During his most recent pint he's accelerated from tipsy to blotto like an unwatched Weeping Angel.  Amusingly, at one point he appears to really annoy himself, but eventually lets whatever upset him slide.  He lost the burger thing, so he has a brainwave - he'll feed Bramble Stella Artois instead, directly from his glass!  Then let Bramble lick all around his chops, cheeks and eyes for ages - almost forcing it, in a slightly creepy way - possibly to show me what lengths I should go to if I actually loved my dog.  I'm sure Meatloaf sang about this situation once.  Ordinarily I wouldn't be keen on Bramble lapping up infamously strong session lager either but I know two things Jim doesn't: 1. There was a large cat shit in the litter tray as I went to bed last night, and 2. It wasn't there this morning.  Bramble is many things, but a fussy eater he is not.  Jim triumphantly emerges from this particular 50/50 challenge with the ball, and his face starts to showboat.  I'm chalking it up as a textbook pyrrhic victory.  "Bramble loves wife beater", I say in a Tarzan voice, and for a brief moment all three of us are ever so pleased with ourselves. 

What's next on the agenda?  If you guessed "why have you got him tied up, he's not going anywhere?" then you'd be correct.  Jim's post-beefburger beef is the fact that one end of the dog lead is tied to the table.  The fact that Brams is lying down with plenty of slack - and has been whenever Jim hasn't been theatrically getting off with him - doesn't seem to register as pertinent.  This is the point where there's no point in maintaining any politeness, so I'm done with any full conversations.  "He's not going anywhere because I'm not letting him off the lead." is my first response, and after his second run at it I'm forced to ask him if this is likely to go on as long as the burger thing.  Don't take it the wrong way, says Jim, he's just the sort of person that tells it how he sees it.  In my experience, most people who feel the need to tell you that they're 'just the sort of person who' [insert whatever they think they do that they're proud of] are cunts, obsessed with banging the drum of their self-perpetuated myth; this is my brand, there are many like it but this one is special.  No-one ever cares.  I'm just the sort of person who doesn't care, Jim.  Something happens RE: the lead, I can't remember exactly what it was that I said, but apparently it requires us to immediately shake hands to smooth it over.  Jim's catcher's mitt is carefully extended less than half way, and it seems we'll be shaking it out like gents.  I know in advance that I won't be getting my hand back for a while.  Yep, 12 seconds in and he's still got hold of it, while we continue to discuss the lead situation.  I'm not budging, and he's clinging to it like a barnacle.  He's having trouble swallowing my brass neck, when if we chart the proceedings back to the inciting incident all I've done is refuse to acquiesce on any of the things that are outside of his sphere of influence.  I like the phrase "why don't you wipe your bum with your left hand?" to counter incessant backseat life coaching (a bugbear of mine), but I don't think I've ever actually used it - it's just something I thought I liked, but now that I've typed it it turns out I don't even like it that much, chiefly because it's crap and makes little sense.  Anyway, I've had enough, so I decide to take a time out and announce that I'm off round the block with the dog.  During the walk I ring my wife to vent, and level headed and reasonable as ever, she suggests driving down to pick Bramble up, permanently removing the visual reminder of his inadequacies as a man.  Or something.  She also really liked the bit about his wife leaving him for his best mate.  10-15 minutes later I'm back in the pub without John Brambo.  The badgers are sad.  Roujin is particularly glum, and probably considers going home.  I apologise, and wonder if Rod Hull had moments like this.  Jim's miffed, but opts against pointing out that I if I loved him I'd never let him leave my side.

At this point he sort of drifts in and out of reality for a while.  Sometimes that shark he go away.  Sometimes he wouldn't go away; now he's at the bar bobbing around like Herbie Robinson caught in the undertow of new wave jazz.  But he mostly does his own thing from this point on, be that a conversation with himself, or with someone he remembers from the olden days who rarely seems genuinely pleased to see him.  In fact, the only real interaction we have until the end of the evening is when I'm outside smoking with a badger known online as Cockbeard.  One of his jokes seems to irritate one of the bargirls, who stubs out a freshly lit cigarette and glares at him as she returns to the pub.  Jim is at the door and he decides to briefly become a hype man of sorts, telling us what great blokes we are and how he doesn't know him (Cocko), but he can tell just by listening to him that he's salt of the earth and that he has a great beard.  Cocko is a great bloke, as far as I can tell, and he does have a great beard, but it seems pretty early to tarnish him with the 'salt of the earth' brush, even if Jim did like his joke. 
 
And that's it, the meandering tale draws to a close.  There's one final flashpoint, and it comes as we leave at the respectable time of around 9.30pm.  I shake hands with my forum buddies and give a snoozing/whaa? I-wasn't snoozing! Jim a pat on the shoulder and a deliver whopping porkie: "Nice to meet you, Jim".  "Nice to meet you Tim!", replies shakeawake Jim.  He doesn't mean it either.   As we leave, Jim takes to his feet and groggily catches up with me outside.  We shake again, and once again he's not letting go, like when the guy from UP really wants to keep hold of his house after his wife moves to Spain.  His T-800 dialogue roulette wheel lands on the burger, again.  "Listen", he barks, subtly announcing that I really need to listen to this particular nugget.  "If you love someone, if you really love someone, do you know what you need to do?".  Fixed eye contact.  Shit got real.  I'm drunk, but I know this might be his big rolling back the years moment; I could be about to know what it feels like to get caught feeding a war veteran slops in an apocryphal story from the 1980s.  Eventually he lets go, points a fat Richmond finger at me and says "he eats what you eat".  

I'd like to pretend I came up with a response that decimated him, like some sort of Three O'Clock High in-your-face! retort, but all I could muster was "he doesn't though, does he?", and with that we went our separate ways.

Wonderful story, and some wonderful pictures. I particuarly like the one with his glasses. He was a dog who knew how to accessorise.

Aye, I'd be surprised if there's a single dry eye in here tonight. Such beautiful pics, and an epic tall tale to boot.

Just the most insane run of prime content, how the fuck did he do it.

Wonderful stuff, Moot. I'm sitting in my car laugh-crying before work.

Rest easy Brambs, you will never be forgotten

It feels churlish to change the subject, but here’s some good news for this thread.

Early Monday morning a woman came to our door asking if we’d seen her missing dog. Honey, a red fox labrador. She’d run off on Sunday from a village two or three miles away and not been seen since.

I took her phone number and shared it with all of our neighbours, just so that if anyone saw Honey they could give her a call.

Her family have been driving around knocking on doors since then. They placed a full-page ad in the local paper. All the usual stuff.

As the days pass, things start to look less hopeful.

This morning, Honey was sitting in our courtyard. Three of us neighbours blocked the only exit and we called with the good news.

Honey was reunited with her owners 10 minutes ago, after four/five days missing, and now I have something in my eye.