Diary of a Dog-walker Read online

  We chose Kudu for our Springer Spaniel because the beast that bears that name is large and springs – and, with Dog-Vanity-by-Proxy (or DVP, a surprisingly common psychological condition), because the nineteenth-century hunter Frederick Selous described the kudu as ‘perhaps the handsomest antelope in the world’. Further research reveals that male kudus are known for the way they ‘avoid violent situations and prefer to side-step danger rather than create it’.

  The Dog shows remarkable emotional intelligence in this regard. There is some rough trade about on Clapham Common, and his method of dealing with aggression is straight out of the manual we BBC types learn when we are sent on courses about operating in Hostile Environments.

  If you are kidnapped, we are told, try not to draw attention to yourself, but at the same time be friendly, and on no account be so grovelling and submissive that the kidnappers feel they can treat you as less than human: that makes you the most likely candidate in a kidnap group to be killed.

  Kudu’s response to one of those growling broad-shouldered types that sometimes swagger up with evil intent on the common is to stand very still with a wagging tail. Everything offers friendship, but there is something of substance about the way he holds himself. He never barks – but very, very occasionally, and only if the back-end sniffing turns nasty, he can do a decent throat-gurgle.

  He has formed a pact with the household cats. They sometimes ask for food and then quite deliberately leave the bowl for him – he rewards them (sorry about this) with a bottom-lick. (‘Just like the office, really,’ remarked one of my friends.)

  The shrubberies of Battersea Park have, during the damp dog-walking days of the crisis created by the unfolding revelations about MPs’ expenses, been haunted by MPs’ spouses, whose spending habits have featured in the newspapers. When the first of these columns appeared, I sent a text message to an MP friend who suffers badly from DVP; his constituents would be quite shocked by the depth of his passion for Magda, his fine-boned Welsh Springer.

  My message read, Hope you have seen handsomest dog in Britain on front page of Daily Telegraph. He was in Singapore at the time, and a nervous question came back: Why is Magda on front of D Tel? Have they worked out that I employ her as my diary secretary?

  Nearly two and a half thousand years ago the prolific Greek writer Xenophon – who seems to have had views on just about everything – wrote a treatise on how puppies should be trained for hunting, and it includes a passage of instruction on naming them. It could have been written yesterday. He says the names should be short so the dogs can be easily called, and the list he offers suggests that the Ancient Greeks liked to project human qualities on to their pets in just the way that we do. Here are some of my favourites:

  Thymus, meaning ‘courage’

  Porpax, meaning ‘shield hasp’ – a little anachronistic, but the pun is fun

  Psyche, meaning ‘spirit’; a beautiful word, although I suppose it could lead to misunderstanding today

  Phylax, meaning ‘keeper’; good for a guard dog

  Xiphon, meaning ‘darter’; perfect for a Whippet

  Phonax, meaning ‘barker’

  Phlegon, meaning ‘fiery’; pretentious to modern ears, perhaps, but worth the social risk for a really noble beast – say, a Mastiff?

  Alce, meaning ‘strength’

  Chara, meaning ‘gladness’

  Augo, meaning ‘bright eyes’

  Bia, meaning ‘force’ – but, like the Hausa word ‘Iska’, tricky for a male dog because it sounds feminine

  Oenas, meaning ‘reveller’

  Actis, meaning ‘ray’ (as in sunlight)

  Horme, meaning ‘eager’ – just right for a dog like Kudu, although of course people would make it ‘horny’, and just occasionally he is that too

  I did not discover this list until long after we had named Kudu, and I am almost tempted to get another dog simply for the pleasure of choosing one of these names. In almost every case the original Greek word is so much sweeter on the ear than its modern English equivalent.

  The heat is on and it’s time to escape old haunts

  27 June 2009

  The lake at Battersea has turned whiffy in the heat – one of the Chelsea ladies declared it ‘could do with a jolly good hoover’. The joggers are there in droves, sweating about the place in a purposeful way quite at odds with the agreeable aimlessness of the damp-weather dog-walking crowd.

  A book I have been recommended opens with a reference to the park’s ‘popular cottaging areas adjacent to the public toilets and the athletics track’ – it is almost a throwaway line, as if everyone knows, but it is news to me and, I am sure, to the Dog.

  Familiar haunts suddenly feel alien. It is time to escape.

  Dogs need to believe that their owners behave logically – just as soldiers must, to stay sane and brave, believe in the wisdom of their generals, and priests in the compassion of their gods. The Dog has formed the view – on the sound evidentiary basis of experience – that green spaces are designed for his pleasure. As we drove past Hyde Park without stopping, his usually phlegmatic disposition gave way to indignation, moving up through the gears to squealing hysteria by the time we hit the A1.

  Kudu has become a minor celebrity: the Stockwell News gave him a headline after my disobliging comments about our local park. But his host at our destination, a venerable Border Collie, was the real thing. Bertie’s home is rented out to filmmakers, and he has had several pad-on parts. Kudu treated him with due deference.

  Bertie’s coup was being stroked by Geraldine James while the ‘Bitty’ scene in Little Britain was being recorded. Readers unfamiliar with ‘Bitty’ should think carefully before they look for it on YouTube. I was shown it just before a Today discussion about breast-feeding, and it is most unsettling. Small wonder a look of existential angst occasionally clouds Bertie’s thoughtful eyes: which of us, after a lifetime of faithful family service and dreams of sheep, could assimilate the sight of a chap manipulating a milk-squirting pump behind the sofa?

  Bertie’s owner – a distinguished lawyer, who therefore has firm views on everything – believes that a dog’s intelligence can be judged by the words it knows. Bertie, he claims, understands all the variations of ‘ride’: whether it is ‘shall we go for a ride?’ or ‘Let’s go riding now’, the dog is off to the tack room. Kudu has a similar learnt response to the Saturday-morning moment when my wife puts her walking jeans on: he becomes so frenzied as denim covers leg that she now delays dressing until the last minute, adding a scandalously exciting dimension of wifely semi-nudity to weekend pleasures.

  We set off, with me on foot and Bertie’s owner on his horse, and were soon in one of those secret stretches of English countryside that fold in on themselves to keep their wildness private. We were less than twenty miles from London – we passed Stratton’s Folly, a tower built by an eighteenth-century merchant so that he could admire his ships on the Thames – but this was still the Hertfordshire that Beatrix Potter loved when she visited her grandmother at Essendon (we could hear its parish bells across the fields).

  Kudu’s most elegant manoeuvre is the Scentguided High-speed Handbrake Turn: when the nose hits something sniffable, it locks on, like a laser to a Tornado, and, whatever his speed, the rest of him swings round it as he decelerates. Watching him work the hedgerows with focused enthusiasm was just the tonic I needed.

  The sniff-centric world-view can make him forget himself, and he has, I fear, been known to lift a leg on a fellow dog-walker’s boots. I once watched impotently as, running ahead, his nose locked on to the shoes of Battersea’s most celebrated walker, Lady Thatcher.

  But there is a fine political instinct in that solid-chocolate head: at the moment critique the leg uncocked, and she gave him a gracious smile.

  The day Jim Naughtie and I broke all the rules

  11 July 2009

  A cardinal rule of broadcasting is never to run: if you arrive breathless in the studio it is impossible to recove
r. Another is that two presenters should never talk together: the listeners hate it. And if you raise your voice – there are exceptions to this – you have probably lost control.

  Dog-walking is different. My Today colleague James Naughtie and I took to Richmond Park on the hottest afternoon of the heatwave. The park is the capital’s giant lung (far and away London’s largest open space), and you breathe more easily within its gates. Even after days of pitiless sun those majestic aspects – with their oaks and deer – looked temptingly lush.

  The Spaniels took off. Jim’s Tess – a ten-year-old Cocker of usually dignified demeanour – spotted a picnic, and the snout was among the sandwiches. My Kudu sprinted to an oak to defecate – a yard from an elderly lady enjoying her book in the shade. The crimes, satisfyingly symmetrical in a curious way, were simultaneous, and Jim and I broke all those broadcasting rules at once as we restored decorum.

  Jim made his confession: in South Africa recently he ate a steak from the Kudu antelope. Mrs Naughtie, he reported, had shown greater scruple, and declined the dish out of respect for the Dog. I salute her sensitivity.

  To the dogs, Richmond offered smells of real country. To me this royal park smells of power; the ghosts of Tudors and Stuarts hunt here, and from Henry’s Mound you can look down on Westminster. We fell to talking about dogs and politics.

  Richard Nixon hated the fact that one of his most famous speeches became identified with the family Spaniel. Running for the vice-presidency in 1952, he faced accusations of financial impropriety. He responded with a television address that saved his place on the Republican ticket.

  After a robust defence of his family’s ‘modest’ lifestyle, he owned up to one gift from a political well-wisher. ‘You know what it was?’ he asked. ‘It was a little Cocker Spaniel dog in a crate … Black-and-white spotted. And our little girl – Tricia, the six-year-old – named it Checkers. And, you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now that, regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.’

  That became known as ‘the Checkers Speech’. Nixon complained it was ‘as though the mention of my dog was the only thing that saved my political career’. Bad news for Spaniel lovers like me: if it had not been for Checkers, there might never have been a Watergate.

  Jim loves American politics; I am fascinated by the French version. I offered an example of the superiority of French culture: the most perceptive biography of the late President François Mitterrand is Le Gros Secret, attributed to his Labrador Baltique.

  Baltique listened as her master quizzed Helmut Kohl about a sauerkraut recipe that might be rich enough to send Margaret Thatcher to sleep at an EU summit (my memory is that it was usually Mitterrand who succumbed to snoozing at these events, but there we go). We learn that Mitterrand bugged Baltique’s toys and sent her to drop them in the offices of those he suspected of disloyalty. And hours of presidential time were spent in training her to pee on Edouard Balladur’s Savile Row trousers.

  Le Gros Secret now costs more than it did when I bought it new in 1995; I suspect its appeal lies beyond the taste of oddballs like me, who are nerdy about modern French politics. Baltique’s desolation as she watches her master decay and die makes her drama, not the president’s, the real story. It is a book about the way we hope dogs feel about us.

  On my return from a recent trip abroad, Kudu greeted me with his muzzle buried between his paws, quivering as if emotion had overcome him. Small wonder we anthropomorphize.

  A pooch knows who’s master and commander

  25 July 2009

  ‘I think your dog is lovely,’ said my neighbour, at a Devon dinner party. ‘Your wife seems very nice too.’

  Kudu had distinguished himself with good behaviour, and was looking magnificent stretched luxuriously on a Turkey rug; it took a beat before I realized I was being teased. Then it was like the moment I opened the fourth cigarette packet in a single day – it was during the siege of Sarajevo, so things were stressful – and understood that I had to get a grip on my addiction: time to take stock of the Dog Habit.

  My Church is stern about the proper relationship between humans and animals. ‘By a most just ordinance of the Creator,’ wrote St Augustine, ‘both their life and their death are subject to our own use.’ Thomas Aquinas proposed the concept of a hierarchy of creation, in which humans sit above animals and are therefore entitled to use them as they see fit.

  This sort of stuff has given Catholicism a reputation for heartless speciesism, but the sound common sense behind it was brought home to me the morning after my sobering Devon dinner.

  Walking in the Blackdown Hills, our host lost his way as we tried to cut back towards the village of Kentisbeare. ‘Better put the dogs on a lead,’ he suggested, as we approached a farmyard. It was a smart move. The farmer yelled as only an angry farmer can, berating us for straying from the footpath. We listened patiently, apologized unreservedly, and then pointed out, by way of mitigation, that the dogs were under control. Angry farmer became calmer, conceded the point and, still grumbling a bit, allowed us to proceed on our way.

  The dogs did not want to be put on leads at that point: it was an intoxicatingly fresh morning, and Kudu strained at his throughout the exchange. We were using them entirely for our own end: the negotiation of a peaceful passage.

  Dogs are incredibly valuable tools in this regard. Walking with a dog always improves the quality of my interaction with other people, and I feel confident about my right to ‘use’ Kudu as a social asset in this way. When a small child wants to stroke him I make the Dog sit for a while; valuable dog time is lost, but the sum of human happiness is increased. Kudu does not especially enjoy this, but he accepts it.

  But the Thomist approach to dog-walking is unfashionable. I chaired a Radio 4 lecture by Professor Peter Singer, the intellectual father of the Animal Rights Movement, and it was an unnerving experience: he is a charming and persuasive man, who can lead you into accepting monstrous propositions.

  Singer believes that sentience, not reason, is the key to rights; to discriminate against a dog – which can feel pleasure and pain – is like discriminating because of skin colour. He argues that a disabled human may be less intelligent than an animal, and that infanticide is not the same as murder because a newborn lacks consciousness. The logic is that it may be more reasonable to ‘put down’ a sick child than a dog.

  My answer is the story of Elinor Goodman’s Pointers.

  The distinguished political commentator – a Battersea Park regular – described the death of her elder dog, Ash. A blanket was laid out on the lawn, and Ash was given a piece of chicken while the vet went about his business. All this was watched by the younger Beagle, Florrie, from the french windows.

  Once the body had been taken away, Florrie bounded out and began scrabbling in the death-blanket. Elinor assumed this was a doggy farewell to a friend and companion. But Florrie was simply looking for the chicken.

  I like to think that my wife would react differently to my own demise. In the end a dog – even the Dog – is just a dog. And very happy like that they are.

  2

  An Imprudent Affection

  ‘THUS IT WAS Melissa who figured it out, sensed it, before he did. Zannis must have dozed because, just after dawn, she growled, a subdued, speculative sort of growl – what’s this? And Zannis woke up.

  ‘Melissa? What goes on?’

  She stood at the window, out there, turned her head and stared at him as he unwound himself from the snarled bedding. What had caught her attention, he realized, were voices, coming from below, on Santaroza Lane. Agitated, fearful voices. Somebody across the street had a window open and the radio on. It wasn’t music – Zannis couldn’t make out the words but he could hear the tone of voice, pitched low and grim.’

  The spy-writer Alan Furst has the hero’s dog announce the invasion of Greece by the Italians in 1940, a pivotal moment in his book Spies of the Balkans. I am a huge Furst fan: his prose h
as the stark clarity of a black-and-white photo (he is also clearly a dog-lover) and the way he uses Melissa here is characteristic of the subtlety that allows him to pack so much into his relatively short thrillers.

  We meet her early in the book: she is a mountain dog, ‘a big girl, eighty pounds, with a thick soft black-and-white coat and a smooth face, long muzzle and beautiful eyes’, with strongly developed guard-dog instincts. Her daily routine goes like this: ‘Queen of the street, she started her morning by walking him [Zannis, the hero] a few blocks towards the office, to a point where, instinct told her, he was no longer in danger of being attacked by wolves. Next she returned home to protect the local kids on their way to school, then accompanied the postman on his rounds. That done, she would guard the chicken coop in a neighbour’s courtyard, head resting on massive paws.’

  Zannis takes her to dinner with his mother once a week, and she emerges as a central figure in the easy-going pre-war life he enjoys as a policeman in the Greek port of Salonika. So, by giving her centre stage at the moment of high drama when the war arrives at Zannis’s front door, Furst gently reminds us of everything his hero has to lose.

  The Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi pulls off the same trick in her memoir In Search of Fatima. Her dog Rex is held up as a kind of symbol of the life she enjoyed as the child of a professional Palestinian family in the Jerusalem of the mid-1940s, when the British ruled Palestine under a UN mandate. Believing firmly in British might and British good faith, the family are slow to accept the growing evidence that a Jewish state is inevitable. Living happily and comfortably, they are reluctant to believe that their lives could be disrupted by violence and war. When they are finally forced to accept reality, by the war of 1948, it is almost too late:

  ‘Ghada! Come on, come on, please!’ Rex inside the iron garden gate, she outside. The house with its empty veranda shuttered and closed, secretive and already mysterious, as if they had never lived there and it had never been their home. The fruit trees in the garden stark against the morning sky.