My first two beloved Weimaraners came into my life a long time ago: Ellie in 1998 and Amber in 2000.
Then, in June 2013, I lost Ellie. Just three months later, in September, I lost Amber unexpectedly too.
Suddenly, the house was horribly empty.
Opening the front door every evening and not having a dog there to greet me felt completely wrong. But I decided I would wait until spring before I started looking for another puppy.
There was, after all, one small consolation: a whole winter without wet, happy, muddy dogs charging through the house.
That plan lasted until just after Christmas.
The Facebook post I nearly didn’t see
I wasn’t prone to checking Facebook at the best of times but, for some reason, at about 11pm one night as I was heading to bed, I noticed several notifications.
Normally I wouldn’t have bothered.
But three notifications seemed worthy of investigation before going to sleep.
When I looked, I discovered that people had been tagging me in a post about a Weimaraner who needed rehoming.
People knew I had a passion for Weimis. They’re wonderfully loyal dogs but notoriously demanding when it comes to stimulation, exercise and company. They also knew there was currently a distinctly dog-shaped space in my life.
Eventually, I managed to speak to Bella’s owner.
He had originally got her from a dog rescue. Bella had been found as a puppy, starving and wandering around a Sussex town before eventually ending up at the rescue centre.
There were signs that whatever had happened to her before then hadn’t been kind. In those early days, she was terrified if you took off a belt — a reaction that strongly suggested she had been hit with one before.
It was immediately obvious that he adored her. Rehoming Bella wasn’t something he wanted to do, but his circumstances had changed.
Quite sensibly, he suggested we go for a walk together first to see how Bella reacted to me.
I thought that was a great idea. I also recruited my Labrador-owning friend and her dog, Jazzy, so we could see how Bella behaved around another dog.
Bella was not remotely interested in Jazzy.
She only had eyes for her owner.
Well… for the first half of the walk.
Then I produced my secret weapon…
Never underestimate the power of liver
Homemade liver-cake training treats.
These things are so delicious — to dogs, obviously — and so spectacularly smelly that I have been practically mugged by strange dogs while walking in the valley.
Bella was no exception.
Suddenly, I became considerably more interesting.
It was decided that Bella would stay with me that evening while her owner was away overnight. So, armed with little more than her food and her blanket, Bella and I spent our first evening together on opposite sides of the sitting room in front of the fire.
Eventually she relaxed and dozed off.
I sent regular photographic updates.
Her owner hadn’t brought a dog bed, so Bella ended up sleeping on my bed.
The following morning I woke to find her stretched along the top of the bedhead.
We stared at each other.
It felt rather like waking up with a strange man in your bed, with both of you wondering what on earth had happened and how you’d got there.
When her owner came to collect her, he could see that she’d been happy with me. A few days later he rang and said I could have her.
When he brought her back for the final time, I could see how distraught he was.
There were tears rolling down his face as he said goodbye.
He loved her enough to let her go.
And Bella became mine.
Have dog, will travel
Bella rapidly became a huge part of my life.
Have dog, will travel.
She came with me to see friends and stay with people and fitted herself into my life as though she’d always been there.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that she had arrived just as another enormous change was beginning.
Looking back, I had probably started becoming perimenopausal around August that year.
So alongside living alone, surviving on a part-time low-wage salary and navigating the usual ups and downs of work, life and relationships — or the lack thereof — there was now the approaching hormonal chaos and anxiety of menopause to contend with.
Bella was there through all of it.
She was incredibly loyal, an excellent guard dog, suffered from separation anxiety and was a terminal food thief.
Bella also had a deeply committed approach to interior design.
On one memorable occasion, she decided that a perfectly respectable toilet roll would be vastly improved if it were shredded into approximately 4,000 pieces and distributed artistically across the floor. She then lay in the middle of the devastation looking completely innocent, as though she had simply arrived at the scene and was as shocked by it as anyone else. It was very Bella: clever, chaotic and somehow impossible to stay cross with for long.
She was also completely adorable.
Bella’s food theft occasionally reached quite impressive levels of ambition.
One day, while I was out, she somehow managed to snaffle a tin of Bird’s Custard Powder from the kitchen. I came home to find her looking distinctly ghostly, with a pale yellow dusting all over her face and the deeply unconvincing expression of a dog who would like you to believe she had absolutely nothing to do with it.
The evidence, unfortunately for Bella, was quite literally written all over her face.
Walking it off
Bella and I walked almost every day with Jazzy and her owner.
Rain or shine, we went out.
Sometimes the walks were long. Sometimes they were short. Occasionally the fog was so thick you could barely see your hand in front of your face.
But those walks became an important part of life.
After work, they were a chance to decompress, talk, breathe and leave the day behind for a while.
They were therapeutic long before I thought of them that way.
And, as an added bonus, walking a Weimaraner every day is an excellent way to keep slim.
Bella, meanwhile, specialised in comfort.
She had an extraordinary ability to identify the best chair or sofa in any house within minutes of arriving.
Aphrodite’s sofa was a particular favourite.
It happened to match her perfectly.
Bella, horses and an unexpected relationship
Bella was also, indirectly, part of the reason I ended up with my current partner.
We had originally become friends through horses. He was also wonderful with dogs and gradually became my regular Bella-sitter whenever I went to see family for Christmas, birthdays or holidays.
From that friendship grew a mutual appreciation of loyalty, animals and a shared tendency to think somewhat outside the box.
He had always had Boxers before Bella.
Now he says he has never met a dog quite like her.
She converted him completely to Weimaraners.
Bella loved coming to the horses too.
She would wander around the yard, keeping a protective eye on anyone suspicious-looking who happened to pass, before finding somewhere comfortable to install herself.
In summer, that might mean sleeping on the bench in the sunshine or sprawling across the hay bales.
In winter, she was perfectly capable of tucking herself underneath a horse rug.
Wherever we were, Bella seemed to decide that was where she belonged.
The hardest goodbye
On Midsummer’s Day in 2025, we had to make the decision to have Bella put to sleep.
There are some decisions you know are right and still desperately wish you didn’t have to make.
She left an enormous hole in both our lives.
For those first few months, neither of us wanted to fill it.
And perhaps you can’t really fill the space left by a particular dog anyway.
They each occupy their own place in your life.
But eventually something began to change.
After years of saying he’d never met a dog like Bella, the former Boxer man and I found ourselves contemplating another Weimaraner.
And now, once again, there is one in our lives.
She’s not Bella.
She was never supposed to be.
But that’s another story.
Above Left: Bella in polo shirt covering her stitches rather than the cone of shame.
Venus’s note
Menopause stories aren’t always stories about HRT, hot flushes or brain fog.
Sometimes they’re about the things — and the creatures — that quietly carry us through enormous changes in our lives.
Bella didn’t know anything about hormones.
She didn’t need to.
She provided routine when life felt chaotic, company when the house might otherwise have been empty, a reason to get outside when staying indoors would have been easier and uncomplicated affection on days when human relationships felt anything but uncomplicated.
She was there for an extraordinary chapter of my life.
My beautiful Bella.
Bella the Bellissima.
