The love of Patch was the patch of love needed in tough times

“He was my saviour last year. It was very, very hard last year,” Vicki said.

“Even when he was a puppy, he would know when I was really sick.”

Vicki still gets occasional debilitating headaches following brain surgery earlier this year and says Patch always knows when she’s having a bad day.

“Last Friday, he laid on the bed all day, he just knew,” she said.

“I’d say, ‘Mummy’s all right’, and he’d put his head on me as if to say, ‘I don’t think so’.”

Of course, while he’s snuggled by her side, he takes the opportunity to lie on his back and solicit belly rubs for his own comfort, too.

Before getting Patch, Vicki had looked into getting a cavoodle.

But with the need for regular grooming and the unwillingness of groomers to travel to Tatura East to perform it, she let go of the idea.

When the opportunity to get a much lower-maintenance Jack Russell came up, Vicki didn’t have to think for long.

Patch was bred by a friend of the Clowes’ daughter-in-law.

Vicki and Ken had been in Murchison, watching two of their grandsons play football, when the breeder brought her eight-week-old pups to the game.

Patch was a tiny bundle of pure joy, too hard for Vicki to resist taking him home that very day.

Mittens, a roughly six-year-old farm cat who came from a litter of strays that Vicki had taken in, pretends she doesn’t like the canine intruder.

“If they know you’re looking at them, she’s swiping and hissing at him, but silently, she comes in the pet door and sleeps in the basket with him at night,” Vicki said.

“When it’s her feed time, she gets fed on the table in the back pergola and she gets up on the cat scratcher and he’s jumping around her, making noise, trying to get at her, but when you’re not looking, they’re eating out of the same bowl.”

In the daytime, Mittens taunts Patch by climbing a tree in the garden just out of his reach.

He takes her bait and runs around the base of the tree until he gets bored with the game.

Though Ken spent weeks building what Vicki describes as a “magnificent” kennel for Patch, he reluctantly looks at them as if to say, “I’m not going in there”, whenever they try to put him in it.

“It’s a nice ornament to stack things up on that we don’t want him to get,” Vicki said with a laugh.

Of course, when he’s had access to inside throughout the summer and learned to drag his own bed around to position it in prime air-con-catching proximity, it’s no surprise he’s opposed to kennel culture.

“They say your energy bills go up when you have pets and there have been times when I’ve put the air-con on just for Patch,” Vicki said.

“He sits there, right in front of it, he knows exactly where it is.

“He’s just delightful, he’s been here before, he’s wise.”

Vicki said Ken would feed Patch chicken and milk first thing in the morning before taking him for a daily ride on the motorbike around their small cherry farm.

When Ken leaves for work in Shepparton at around 7am, Patch transfers his loyalty to Vicki for the day.

“He goes, ‘okay, I’m all yours, Mum’, and I get all the care then,” Vicki said.

“He’s very faithful. He flies in, jumps on the bed, tries to lick faces.”

Patch, who likes to roam endlessly around the farm and exert boundless energy during visits to the football, is still not opposed to being coddled, even letting Vicki accessorise him with a hat on game days.

“They will push you to your limit, they’re like children,” Vicki said.

“I just couldn’t imagine life without him. He’s just the best.”