Diary of a Dog-walker (2 page)

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 walking 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.

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.