Bertie the Jack Russell has figured in these notes more than once.

I'm still not sure if its him that will suffer a catastrophic end first, or me simply blowing up with a heart attack from his latest outrage.

In the last ten days he has had two narrow escapes. Both different, both a new form of risking your life. Both of them make me wince with the horror of what could have happened.

We've been renovating one bay of our massive shed into a workspace for my wife. Its got a concrete floor, lights, racks and racks of storage and I paneled and insulated the walls. Otherwise it’s a hotbox in summer and an icebox in winter.

Still not finished, it was done in a rush, and there are loose ends here and there.

The paneled walls, for example, were done with big sheets of MDF board. I simply slid them into place, the tops ending up just above the mezzanine deck above us. What that means is there was an open cavity accessible to rats, which Bertie discovered.

I heard him scrabbling about on the mezzanine floor above us, and went up the stairs to see what was going on. As I reached the top of the stairs he looked at me with that "There's a rat in there" look…and leapt into the cavity. The drop is 2.4 metre. Didn't look like that to him, because of the insulation pads filling the space, but the fibreglass collapsed under his weight.

I jumped across the floor and flung myself into the gap and just caught his back leg with the tips of my fingers. Gripping him like death I dragged him back out, enough to grab his collar and lift him out.

I capped the cavity the next day.

And this morning…..another rat-orientated crisis. This time Bertie announced there was a rat in our buggy. The announcement takes the form of him running round and round the buggy poking his nose in any gaps. If I try and grab him he dodges me, and its only when I get genuinely angry that he gives up and hops in the buggy.

But this morning he didn't do that. I couldn't see him. Tempted as I was to just drive off, I got out with my torch, (still dark at 6am at the moment) and walked around the buggy. No sign of him. I dropped to my knees in the wet dirt and looked under the buggy.

Bertie was there, jerking violently. With his collar hooked on the bottom of the buggy, he would have been dragged to his death if I'd driven off.