On Tuesday night, our dear old dog Ozzy — our Prince of Darkness, our Black Labbath — decided it was time to go. After a gradual decline in health since his 13th birthday a few short weeks ago, he eventually refused all food and drink, and went downhill very quickly.

We laid him on his bed in front of the fireplace and all four of us gathered around him, stroking him, telling him how much we love him, thanking him for being such a wonderful member of our family, looking through old photos of our years together. Thea and Gwen said goodnight to him and then, with the girls safely tucked up asleep in bed, Ozzy’s body started to give up, and Sam and I held him until his last breath.

It was, in so many ways, the best departure any of us could hope for: naturally, in a favourite spot, surrounded by loving family.

Ozzy was a gentle giant if ever there was one. He let the girls clamber over him when they were babies and always knew how to be careful with them. Whenever he played with a smaller dog, he adjusted his behaviour to be more gentle — as was the way with our other (and much smaller) dog Benji, who we adopted last year. Ozzy had absolutely no desire to be the dominant dog in any situation, but was playfully mischievous every single day.

His cheeky demeanour permeated everything he did, and he was never cheekier than when it came to food. Despite only being three-quarters Black Labrador (he was one-quarter Rhodesian Ridgeback, we found out through a DNA test), his love for food — or, more specifically, things that could very loosely be considered edible — ruled every fibre of his being. We always said that the day Ozzy loses his appetite would be the day to worry about him — and indeed it was.

Objects That Should Not Be Ingested were Ozzy’s speciality. Wood from the fireplace. TV remotes. Important documentation that arrived in the post. At one point, a rotting rabbit corpse filled him with both glee and bacteria. He happily darted far from our reach and our cries of “drop it!”, the corpse’s legs dangling from his mouth, then vomited the whole thing up on our shag pile rug, which — after a few days attempting and failing to clean it — we had to destroy. Over the years, in fact, Ozzy destroyed a lot of things we’d paid good money for.

For most of his life — really until his final year — Ozzy felt that anyone walking in the field without a dog should be regarded as highly suspicious, and he would greet these suspicious solo walkers by running at them, barking. The trouble is, people who don’t have dogs are, statistically speaking, far more likely to be scared of dogs. And so it was that many of these dogless innocents that Ozzy chose to run and bark at were exactly the kind of people for whom this was the stuff of nightmares. On a wet, overcast day, a big black hellhound, emerging from the mist — often drooling to the point of appearing as if he was frothing at the mouth — was probably the very last thing they appreciated being confronted by on their previously peaceful morning stroll.

For his entire life, Ozzy was a constant source of embarrassment. And yet now I’d give anything to be embarrassed by him one last time.

Ozzy was present for just about every single milestone that adult life has thrown at us: we adopted him shortly after buying our first house; he was here when we got married in 2012; he was here on Thea’s very first day in 2015; he was here on Gwen’s very first day in 2018. Trying to find an image to accompany this post that could somehow represent his 13 years of companionship has been so hard that I wanted to limit it to just one — and one which I’ll probably end up changing once this post is live — but when I looked back through the recent photos on my phone, I realised the very last one I took of him was this, and I had to include it, too:

We’ll always love you, Ozzy, and life’s not quite the same without you.