Diary of a Dog-walker Read online

  About the Book

  ‘If you are accompanied by a dog you can talk to anyone, and anyone can talk to you – about anything . . .’ And they do. Edward Stourton’s walks with Kudu, his dog, become an opportunity for wonderfully unlikely encounters, and reflecting on the world from the dog-walker’s perspective proves remarkably illuminating. Ed and Kudu’s small trips to the park offer up big insights into romantic attachment, honour and heroism, guilt and depression, our sense of duty, beauty and the hard facts of life’s pecking order. Diary of a Dog-Walker is witty, wise and will be utterly irresistible to any man or woman with a dog.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Diary of a Dog-Walker:

  Time spent following a lead

  Edward Stourton

  To Fiona, Eleanor and Rosy, the women in Kudu’s life

  1

  Letting a Dog Into Your Life

  Diary of a Dog-Walker

  Daily Telegraph, Saturday, 30 May 2009

  ONE OF THE Dog’s admirable qualities is an instinct for friends with elegant owners, and it is a glamorous gaggle that gathers around the bandstand on this fine May morning. We are in Battersea Park, across the river from Chelsea, and one or two of the hacking jackets on display are cut with just a little more dash than is strictly necessary for dog-walking.

  They are all there – the sniffers and trotters, the sprinters and plodders, the yappers and slobberers, the shaggy and the soigné. While they do their doggy thing about our feet, we, their masters and mistresses (or perhaps their servants?), do ours. We talk. Here, I have discussed everything from high politics in the Middle East to the low points of divorce, from children and jobs through plays, books and exhibitions to holiday homes, the credit crunch, and – of course – canine triumphs and tragedies. This easy-going social intercourse is the great revelation of dog-owning in middle age. If you are accompanied by a dog you can talk to anyone, and anyone can talk to you – about anything.

  To get there, you need the capacity for benign amnesia that allows mothers to repeat the pain of childbirth and authors to submit themselves to the racking anxieties of a new book. I once shared my life with a rumbustious Spabrador (a Spaniel/Labrador cross) but even her most searing indiscretions have now been rose-tinted into jolly anecdotes. When she was a puppy my daughter trained her to use a sheet of newspaper as her lavatory: one Sunday morning she jumped on to the bed as I was reading the Sunday Telegraph and, before you could say ‘Pavlov’, there it was, hot and steaming in the middle of a piece of finely crafted prose from Sir Peregrine Worsthorne (no offence, I am sure, intended).

  You also need a post-modernist ability to hold two completely contradictory views simultaneously in your mind. We who make our regular pilgrimage to Battersea Park know that a dog is just a dog (whatever the park’s splendid Buddhist Temple may hint to the contrary), that it will never write a great book or win a Nobel Prize. We know that evolution has taught it the charm that compels our attention to its wants and needs. And yet we allow ourselves to speak and think of dogs as friends, individuals with a full claim on our affections.

  The reward is that dog-walking becomes like reading a novel, or watching a play: disbelief is suspended and, for an hour or so, we are given licence to escape ordinary life. Fantasy flourishes, and really quite trivial moments in dog life become a source of wonder to be repeated, discussed, laughed about and even worried over with its human family.

  The novel the Dog and I enjoy in Battersea is at the Jane Austen end of the market. He can do a noble profile that would put Mr Darcy to shame. One of his admirers, while skiing in St Moritz, bought him a collar studded with golden cows; it gives him the slightly foppish air of the Alexander Pope dog whose collar carried the legend

  ‘I am his Highness’ Dog at Kew;

  Pray tell me sir, whose dog are you?’

  And I was once approached in the park with an unsolicited proposal of marriage, conditional, of course, on a full inspection of his pedigree (the lady in question, with a home off the King’s Road and a weekend shooting habit, could not have been a more suitable bride, but sadly the pedigrees revealed that his father was her grandfather).

  Here, at home in his local park, he has a south-London life that is more Trainspotting than Pride and Prejudice. Not many of his smart Chelsea friends have looked up from their snuffling to see a heroin addict lowering his trousers in search of a vein that still works. There is a Stockwell swagger to the Dog’s style, fancy collar notwithstanding.

  His name is Kudu. In the next of these columns I shall introduce him more fully – and explain where he may take us. Then we shall follow his nose.

  I was over fifty and a hardened hack, but I was as nervous as hell when I sent in that first column.

  I sat down to write it and stared at the cursor at the top of an empty screen. It brought on a terrible failure of nerve. The nice thing about mainstream news journalism is that you do not generally have to work too hard to persuade the audience to engage; if you are reporting a war or a superpower summit, or interviewing a president or a prime minister (I’ve done six of the last eight British ones, which makes me feel dreadfully old), it is fairly self-evident why the story matters. Could I really persuade people that my daily doings with the dog were a ‘must read’ on a Saturday morning?

  Because I have worked – mostly – as a broadcaster, I have spent all my professional life ruthlessly excluding any hint of personal opinion from my output; a column, of course, is an entirely personal piece of writing. And while scripting for broadcast means being direct, simple and, above all, linear (lesson number one: a viewer or listener cannot go back to the beginning of the story if they miss something in the way a newspaper reader might), the columnist’s art lies in discursive sallies and a judicious seasoning of baroque stylistic curlicues.

  So, what a relief it was when the paper thudded on to the mat that Saturday morning and the piece was really there. My wife pointed out unkindly that Kudu’s head-shot was rather more flattering than mine, but it was still a milestone moment in my journalistic career.

  The column was an accidental child of a rather miserable moment in my professional life. In December 2008 I learnt that I was losing my job as a presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme. One of the unexpected consequences was the discovery that I was a popular figure with the readers of the Daily Telegraph. The newspaper ran a campaign on my behalf and a surprisingly (and very gratifyingly) large number of them wrote in to support it. When the dust had settled, a senior member of the paper’s editorial team got in touch to ask whether I would be interested in writing for them on a regular basis.

  I felt rather sheepish when I pitched the idea of making Kudu’s life the focus for my contributions: it was about the time the paper was beginning its revelations about MPs’ expenses, a story that has had a profound and lasting impact on the character of British politics. Dog-walking seemed a tad trivial by comparison. But, to my great delight, the bigwigs gave the proposal a thumbs-up.

  Laurence Sterne’s character Tristram Shandy attributes his obsession with the subject of Time to the conversation that took place between his parents at the moment of his conception: ‘Pray, my dear, quoth my mother,’ he writes in his Life and Opinions, ‘have you not forgot to wind up the clock? – Good G-! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate
his voice at the same time – Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?’ Kudu’s journalistic future was perhaps sealed in the same way because he was conceived – as a concept, rather than literally – in the course of a longish liquid lunch.

  The great journalistic tradition of lunchtime boozing on a heroic scale is almost dead now. In 1979, when I joined ITN as a graduate trainee, the entire staff would abandon the building for the pubs and restaurants of Fitzrovia and Soho. The general reporters only really had to work if they were assigned a story, so they would simply set up camp in a restaurant called the Montebello in Great Portland Street, merrily pouring red wine down their throats until the news desk called on the restaurant phone (no mobiles in those days, of course). If you had a contact to entertain it was Bertorelli’s, L’Escargot or the Gay Hussar, and the company paid.

  Nowadays we are all far too busy – and, anyway, the culture will not allow it; Private Eye’s perennial caricature Lunchtime O’Booze should really be renamed Lunchtime No Booze. Journalists are a good deal healthier as a result, and I, for one, do not have anything like the stamina I had then – much more than a glass at lunch and I need a power nap (actually more of a siesta) to recover. But I regret the passing of the institution. Contacts sometimes told you things over lunch – real stories that no one else knew about. And it was, above all, a chance to discuss ideas, swap gossip and generally ruminate on the World in a relaxed and expansive way. It made journalism – dare I say it? – fun. I was lucky enough to be part of the wonderfully inventive team that got Channel 4 News off the ground, and quite a lot of the creative juices that made the programme the institution it is today were released by Charlotte Street pasta and Chianti.

  So, on those rare occasions when the chance of a good old-fashioned journalistic lunch pops up, I’m afraid I leap at it. In the aftermath of 11 September 2001 I made several radio series about the impact of that terrible day. The formula was simple: persuade as many as possible of the key political and diplomatic players to talk to us, ask them to tell their stories, and then weave the different accounts together. It worked better than we could have hoped. Sometimes, if we were lucky, we managed to put together both sides of a telephone conversation between senior politicians from different capitals, and the narrative could be compelling. But it was hard pounding, and at the end of each of these epic efforts the exhausted producer, editor and I would go out to lunch together to celebrate.

  It was in the course of one of these convivial, very mildly boozy (wimpishly so, by the standards of the 1970s and early 1980s) lunches that our editor mentioned her English Springer Spaniel bitch was pregnant. There was a waiting list for the puppies, but there might – who knew? It depended on the size of the litter – still be a couple that needed homes …

  It was one of those moments when a constellation of factors comes propitiously together. I was about to begin a new book, so I knew that for the next six months or so I would be avoiding too many foreign trips. And having been a dog-owner when I wrote my first book, I remembered what useful aids to creativity they can be: when your head feels clogged with facts, a good stomp through greenery can be just what it needs to shake them into a shape that makes sense.

  And my life on the Today programme seemed settled then. The Today working pattern means being in the office when everyone else is at home (I used to leave at three forty a.m. and get home just before ten) and being at home when everyone else is in the office – so the dog would not be left alone for long stretches. Finally (I kept quiet about this one) I rather fancied some male company: at the time, the other members of our household were my wife, my daughter, my stepdaughter and two cats (one male, but he had been neutered, so he didn’t quite count); the mix needed gender balancing.

  My daughter Eleanor, and Rosy, my stepdaughter, were, of course, enthusiastic allies in the dog project. Convincing my wife that we should have another animal – and a much more high-maintenance one than the cats – proved trickier, and I had to give a guarantee in blood that he would be my sole responsibility. She was thus persuaded into an exploratory family expedition to inspect the litter – ‘No commitments, just to see if we like the idea.’

  As she was leaving the office that afternoon one of her colleagues threw her a piece of worldly wisdom: ‘If you’ve got to this stage,’ he said, ‘you won’t be deciding whether, you’ll be deciding which one.’ She came very close to changing her mind.

  In the end Kudu took matters into his own paws: as we peered into the squealing mass of warm flesh in the puppy box, he pushed through his brothers and sisters and tried to climb up Rosy’s arm. That was it.

  And for a while it all went swimmingly. There were, of course, a few teething problems. The cats peered into his box when he arrived and, with comedy H. M. Bateman-like expressions of indignation, headed over the garden wall. It was at least a week before they moved back in. I caught the new arrival trying to take a dump behind the sofa in the drawing room, but he looked guilty even as he was doing it, and a shout from me ensured it was a one-off. By and large the house-training process was achieved with remarkably little damage to the fixtures and fittings.

  He was nervous on his first outings to the local park – there were some embarrassing moments when he squatted on the ground and refused to move – but he soon got the point, and within a few weeks he and I had settled into a rhythm: I would return from a Today shift, take him to Battersea Park or Clapham Common for a head-clearing walk, and then the two of us would repair to the garden shed where I do my writing.

  Kudu made a very early literary début. My book was about political correctness, and one of the problems that preoccupied me on those early walks was how far politics should dictate the language we use – whether, for example, a female chairman should be called a chair, a chairperson or, as the New York Times once wittily suggested, a chairperdaughter. My answer flowed from the idea that naming a person or a thing is a mechanism for asserting power – the way Adam is given the power to name the animals in the Book of Genesis being the earliest example.

  To illustrate the power of naming, I related the intense family battle there had been about Kudu’s name. It was the early days of the Facebook phenomenon, so everyone, including members of the family who were not living with us, could join in. In my book I described ‘a ferocious tit-for-tat of proposal and counter-proposal between my stepdaughter and my daughter, names flashing back and forth like an exchange of machine-gun fire … My younger son, on his gap year somewhere in the Amazon rainforest, occasionally sent facetious suggestions via the Internet. “I met a lovely Brazilian girl who called herself Madame FruFru – any chance of me pitching that to the board?” and simply “Meatflaps” were examples of the sort of unhelpful ideas we found waiting in our Facebook inboxes. The elder son was superior (“Psmith with a silent P?”), and more upmarket ideas floated in from his girlfriend (“Truman” and “Benedict” among them) …’ All this, I argued, had much more to do with power-relationships within the family than it did with the dog.

  I concluded that in principle people should be allowed to choose the way they would like to be described. If someone who is visually impaired would rather be referred to as ‘partially sighted’, why not respect that? The idea that we should – as a default position at least – take people at the estimation they place on themselves seems civilized to me, and I called it the Kudu Principle because the dog helped me formulate it.

  Kudu helped me in one other significant way during those early months of his life. I am, by nature, a gregarious fellow, and writing a book is a solitary business. The Today team are a jolly bunch, but because the presenter’s job means an office life of a couple of hours’ intense preparation followed by three hours of live broadcasting it is a little like being a soldier who only joins his unit when they go into battle; there isn’t much opportunity for gossip and idle chat. This is a sad fact to admit, but increasingly I found that my social life became focused around wa
lking the dog.

  He was such a pretty puppy that no one we met could resist smiling at him and talking to me. And very relaxing it was to chat to people with a common interest that had nothing whatever to do with the matters that generally preoccupied me during working hours.

  By the time I began writing my dog columns my professional life had changed dramatically, but when I re-read these first pieces I am reminded of the carefree spirit of those early dog-walking days.

  Commodore Coco Fluffy Paws is no name for a dog

  13 June 2009

  The Dog’s best Battersea friend is called Achilles. The name was inspired by a young boy’s affectionate and rather good joke against his mother: endless fun, he thought, could be had from hearing her call, ‘Achilles … heel!’

  Being a Spaniel, Achilles doesn’t really do heel. He can, however, lay claim (I suspect) to being the only dog in SW1 to have a Homeric Epithet. In The Iliad, the description ‘fleet-footed’ is almost always attached to the name of Achilles, and as the glorious streak of sprinting gold that bears the mythical warrior’s name disappears in pursuit of some deliciously dead piece of London wildlife, the phrase suits him all too well.

  Finding a name that fits your dog is hazardous – the madness that brought it into your life can tempt you into exuberance. Our neighbours have just negotiated the siren temptations of ‘Duke Pompom of Stockwell’, ‘Commodore Coco Fluffy Paws’, and Tinchy (after Tinchy Strider, a rapper, since you ask), but settled on the perfectly sensible and appropriate ‘Teddy’ for their Poodle.

  Our own Dog was named in honour of his ancestral heritage: his mother’s owners have a South African background, and their animals are named in Zulu and Afrikaans. Our search for something suitable turned up one name I rather regret: Iska means ‘the wind’ in the West African language Hausa. It is melodious, but that final a gives it a feminine feel, and the Dog is very blokeish – so I offer it to any reader seeking a name for a fleet-footed bitch.