o'cockaigne

On Friday 8 March, Sonja, Vision, Chidish and I left early in the morning for Birmingham, Crufts. The journey went well to the French border, then the misery began. The French had turned off road sections and this caused long traffic jams with similar waiting times. Extremely annoying! Fortunately we had left very early and had a significant margin. Luckily the check of the hounds at the Eurotunnel was super fast and we arrived just in time for our check. But the French were consistently bullying and every car had to open at passport control. This of course took forever and people who went through the check after us missed their train. Fortunately we were just in time and had the planned crossing. When we arrived in England we could only continue for a short while, then we ended up in one big traffic jam towards Birmingham. All roadworks made sure that we arrived an hour later than planned in the pouring rain at our hotel in Leamington. After walking with the hounds and bringing the stuff upstairs, we first started drinking a well-deserved beer. Delicious, such an English bitter!

Saturday morning we got up early again, I walked quite a bit with Chidish and Vision and Sonja lubricated the sandwiches. After breakfast we left and with half an hour we were at the NEC. First, 57 Pharaohounds were tested before it was the turn of the 98 reported Deerhounds. This gave the opportunity to greet acquaintances, to talk a little here and there and to be amazed about a non-Scottish who walked around in Scottish clothing and also showed his Deerhound in this clothing. Something that really cannot go wrong and many people were disgraced.

Our judge was Mr. Ken Aird, the judge that made Chidish BOB two years ago during the Jahresausstellung in Volkmarsen. So it was quite a bit exciting. But it soon became apparent that the inspections were very different from those in Germany; the placements were surprising to say the least. There was no line in terms of type or movement; everything was placed together. Chidish was fourth in his class (8) and Vision surprisingly second of the 12 reported bitches.

In the end, in our eyes, it was definitely not the best male and female and the veteran male, who was showing his age, won Best of Breed. That was Crufts, for the time being we are not going to go again, especially after it took us over an hour to get out of the parking lot. Fortunately the return trip on Sunday went very well and we were back at the beginning of the evening.