The sunlight has returned to England. The butterflies are at play; the pesky flies are making their crazy-legged circuits once more. Nature is awake.

And the garden door stood open today, letting in thick forest air, not one, but two dogs ambled dustily in and out, sniffing keenly at everything which was finally coming to olfactory life once more, laying down a few scents here and there, snapping at lazy flies.

We are hosting my sister’s keen-eyed sheep dog, Clover, once more. Life is a tad more frenetic, a tad more fantastical. She pads along to the beat of her own drum.

As she aimed a set of admirable teeth at a passing housefly, I became aware that the other of the two dogs was exhibiting slightly unusual behaviour. And it happened to be my own house dog, Macaulay.

Our kitchen window looks out onto our garden, a picture which can vary wildly between glorious, barren and rampant.

Directly outside is a bench. We sit on this bench and drink tea and put the world to rights with many-pointed conversations from April to September. It is getting old, but we pad the bench up with cushions and shawls and fleece blankets until it is a couch fit for a king.

Underneath the monarch’s couch today stood a small dog.

And he was walking back and forth underneath the bench. I could hear his tufty doggy hair rasping as he did so, back and forth, back and forth, because he is only very slightly shorter than the legs of the garden furniture.

It was only at this point that I took a moment to reflect on strange, suspect moments which have been happening all Winter. I’d observe it, but because I was in the middle of this party or that dinner, and the outside oddity did not even come close to the idiosyncratic behaviour inside, I put the behaviour on a shelf somewhere in the high-stacked shelves of my mind for later perusal.

But I forgot to peruse.

Now, gazing at a scene I do not even contemplate from October to March, all the dominoes came crashing down and a form of uneasy enlightenment was mine.

Accompany me, if you will, to a dark night in November. It does not do to have the door open for any length of time in temperatures such as the eleventh month can bring. Frost and snow, if not arrived, are presaged by inhospitable winds which can rob a comfy kitchen of its cheer in a trice.

But the dog will out.

He stands stolid at the door with an air of immoveable, nonnegotiable expectation. I am going out now, his stance declares. I am a dog and it is my right, Comrade.

I open the door and he slips out like a silverfish. Who would have guessed one so immovably definite could prove so agile? I return to an animated conversation a huit at the table until a woof summons me to admit one dog.

But the woof, today, is not for me.

He’s under the bench in the pitch dark, and he’s not coming out. Back and forth, back and forth he goes. I turn on the garden light and immerse myself in the sharpest of air to investigate. “What is it, boy?” I ask kindly, the cold pitching my voice a mite higher than usual.

He doesn’t answer: he’s a dog. He just walks beneath the bench, back and forth, back and forth, and no hint of a little mouse, or anything more sinister, can I see.

This is the first of many similar episodes. My mother spots him one day. “What on earth is he doing?,” she demands, and I shrug my shoulders and I say, Mum, I have absolutely no idea. And each time it happens something even crazier knocks it out of my mind, for the house in which I live is filled with incident and never dull.

The other night, I was talking to Phil.

The dog has an atrocious habit of waking the household up in the early hours. He starts with a low woof and gets louder and louder, a gradual crescendo until it can no longer be called a woof, and has become a bark, and will wake the neighbours if not checked.

It is somehow linked with his bench behaviour.

When he goes out he rarely goes on a garden rummage. Instead, he’s beneath the bench, back and forth, back and forth. Rasp, rasp, rasp. Phil and I remarked upon it somewhere in the middle of the night after Mac’s latest commune with his favourite piece of garden furniture, and then I forgot the entire conversation.

“He’s scratching his back,” Phil said prosaically. “It’s just the right height to itch the bits he can’t reach.”

And then we drifted off to the strains of an iPod relaying 2001: A Space Odyssey.

All these cumulative moments came together as I watched my dog happily back scratching beneath his favourite bench on a dazzling April morning. It has taken me all Winter to put two and two together.

Odd dog.

Image courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk