Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (22 page)

7 April 2009

I think I am becoming more commanding in my instruc tions to Henry. I can almost feel my voice getting inadvertently deeper when I shout him. Dee, meanwhile, has taken to calling him my ‘alter doggo’. I’m choosing to take this as largely a reference to my walking hat, and its spaniel-style ears. He’s still a little slow in coming to me, but he
does
always come, eventually. There are moments, like the one a couple of hours ago, on the heath a mile from home, where I was almost passing myself off as a proper dog owner. The illusion was only shattered when Henry began having a ‘conversation’ with two Border col lies and a red setter. Was it the item of mod clothing my dad calls ‘YOUR NANCY BOY COAT’ that blew it for me? Or my shout of ‘Hey! Leave those ever-so-slightly bigger dogs alone!’? Weighty arguments, no doubt, exist for both.

2 May 2009

Henry has had an accident. While staying at Hannah’s parents’ house last week, he broke into their kitchen bin, despite the fact that, as a precaution for precisely such an eventuality, said rubbish receptacle had been weighted down with two bricks. During this adventure, Henry managed to eat 2.5kg of old food, tissues, cellophane wrappers, and some leftover Chinese ribs. This has resulted in what Hannah has described as ‘a blockage’, leading to an operation, and stitches. Henry is currently being carried around the office in one of the blue woven plastic bags customers pick up near the entrance of IKEA, though Hannah assures me that this does not stop him from attempting to jump up and ‘go for the ties’ of executive male members of staff.

19 May 2009

Am I now officially hound-friendly? It would seem so. This afternoon I walked, Henryless, between the Norfolk villages of Castle Acre and West Acre. After a mile or two, I passed by a welcoming-looking pub, with ‘Don’t Spook the Horse: 7.30’ written on a sign outside. I couldn’t work out if this served as an advertisement for some live music, or just as a general instruction for the welfare of passers-by. No horse emerged, but a small brown mongrel – the kind of dog a person finds himself wanting to call ‘Rascal’ – did, then followed me down a lane leading to a ford. I attempted to shoo him back, but he seemed quite determined, and continued to walk a few paces ahead of me. There was a presumption about this on his part, as if this had all been prearranged by a third party: his dark lord and master, perhaps, who lived in a cave at the end of the footpath he now led me along.

This point in my seven-mile route involved a number of stiles, twists, turns and cross-field paths, but Rascal, keeping pace ahead of me, seemed familiar with it, and needed no instruction. I passed another couple of ramblers, and, if they could sense that he was not my dog, they didn’t show it. But I worried. What if we passed Jim and Mary from the village, for example, and they wanted to know what the strange bloke with the beard was doing with Brian the Landlord’s dog?

What if Jim was a nosy type, known for his interfering ways and bad poetry in the parish newsletter? I could imagine the accusations of theft, the subsequent trial, with Hannah standing on the witness stand, a betrayed look across her face, confessing, ‘Well, I do admit I thought it was a
bit
strange when he told me he was into borrowing dogs, but I thought he seemed trustworthy enough. Now, though, I realise I was naive.’

Rascal and I must have walked a full mile before he turned around and scuttled home, in a manner no more explicable than the one in which he’d joined me. After that, I only saw two more dogs on the walk, and neither of them followed me, though one, a Briard, did leap up and put its muddy paws on my chest. This seemed a more familiar canine perception of me: not as companion, but as the kind of sap who would smile, chuckle nervously and not complain if he got a big load of crud all over his Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers t-shirt.

25 June 2009

Henry seemed fully recovered when I collected him today. With the addition of a sleek haircut – the dogwig is gone, and I can’t pretend I don’t miss it – he actually looks healthier than ever. When I arrived at Hannah’s, he commenced his usual routine, with no noticeable difficulty; this involves him stealing his lead from my hand, then running in maniacal circles for three or four minutes before he allows me to attach it. I then stroke and pat him, and he seems to enjoy it, but here I miss the feedback I receive from my cats. I have no idea whether I’m rubbing him up the wrong way or the right way and I suspect he doesn’t care.

‘Are all dogs like this?’ I wonder. I know you don’t get purring dogs, but surely some canines are a little more discerning, and offer a more comprehensive appraisal of your affections. Having said that, I’m yet to meet one. I suppose this says a lot about why I’m a cat owner. I love dogs, but I’m not sure if I truly respect them. They’re too easily pleased, and their judgement offers no true preparation for the trials of real life.

Some of this is undoubtedly down to intelligence. Dogs chase cats in the folklore of cartoons, but the reality is rarely as simple. In almost every household I know containing dogs and cats, the cats have the upper hand. In the vicinity of my last house, there were few sights more satisfying than watching my neighbour Jenny’s little dog Tansy trying it on with Jenny’s hulking black moggy Spooky, then getting a sound paw-slapping for her trouble. Even if a dog such as Henry came to live with my cats and retained the physical upper hand, the labyrinthine complexity of their mind games would soon get the better of him.

Nonetheless, I am not sure you could call Henry completely stupid. Evidence of a primal and mysterious intellect of some form can certainly be found in the timing of his whimpering on our car journeys. I still haven’t experienced the obsession with speed that Hannah warned me about early on, but I have noticed that a couple of minutes before I park the car at our destination, be begins to squeak and pip excitedly. Take today, for example: I’ve checked with Hannah, and I know Henry has never before visited the enchanting Arts and Crafts village of Thorpeness, on the Suffolk coast, yet from a few minutes before I pulled into Leiston Leisure Centre car park, where our walking route started, his familiar chorus began.

This is not merely a matter of him responding to the slowing of the car. I slow the car down plenty of times on our journeys – sometimes I even stop for petrol – and Henry barely stirs. But, in Henry’s mind, who is to say I’m not going to stop and walk him round a petrol station? This seems evidence of a different extreme stupidity/crafty intelligence dichotomy to the one found in cats, but it does seem to share something in common: the overwhelming sense that an animal is reading my mind.

16 July 2009

Perks of dog borrowing, #173: So far this week I have used the phrase ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to forgive me: my car smells of spaniel’ three times. My car does not actually smell of spaniel. It is just very dirty.

3 August 2009

My walking regime for this year means that I’ve also been doing something I haven’t done with any regularity for two decades: rambling through the countryside with my parents. This is rather unnerving for them, as it occurs without me asking, ‘How long is it to go
now
?’ or lagging behind them and practising my golf swing, and rather alarming for me, as there’s a thirteen-year-old part of me that still feels it’s my duty to not enjoy walking with my parents and to ask, ‘How long is it to go
now
?’ and lag behind them practising my golf swing.

I’ve been a bit slow in taking Henry on a walk with my mum and dad. Not that I could remotely imagine Henry scaring any human being, but my dad was bitten by an Alsatian when he was young, and has a slightly fractious relationship with dogs as a result. This is a shame, because in many ways, a pet dog of his own would be a perfect apprentice for my dad: a creature who could look up adoringly and non-judgmentally at him as he makes a succession of wordplay-based jokes and campaigns evangelically to get everyone around him to listen to the Radio 4
News Quiz
. My canine world is one where you say, ‘Hello!’ to dogs in a posh voice, they say hello back to you, then move along their way, or at the very worst, smear their paws on your new Aerosmith t-shirt. My dad’s, by contrast, is one where snarling East Midlands men in baseball caps say, ‘Don’t worry, mate, ’e not hurt you’ a split second before their Rottweiler gnaws chunks out of your cheek.

I often suggest to my mum that she and my dad get a dog, and not just because, having now got a taste for dog borrowing, I am actually fantasising about building myself a network of canines available for my use at a succession of evenly spread points across the British Isles. I tell them it would suit their lifestyle well, and would be a brilliant addition to their walks.

‘Ooh no, I don’t think it would work,’ my mum says. ‘Life’s already too complicated as it is. And I don’t know if your dad would really like it.’

It would be an understatement on a par with many of his own overstatements to say that my dad is prone to exaggeration, but I can see there’s truth in what he says: dogs and he do appear to have some insurmountable issues. It’s as if they both come into each encounter knowing the mutual history of their breeds. My dad and dogs don’t just nod and go along with their business. When they cross paths, Things Happen. Just a month ago when he was walking in Cambridgeshire, my dad found a stray golden retriever wandering through a meadow. Not spotting any owner around, he removed his belt from his baggy cord trousers, tied it around the retriever’s neck, and began to lead it back towards a nearby village, in an attempt to find its owner. A mile further on, he was surprised to find a woman in wellies in her mid-forties charging up to him, accusing him of stealing her beloved pet.

When my dad walks, he invariably carries with him a ‘dog dazer’, in case of emergencies: a handheld device that emits ultrasonic sound waves that stun aggressive dogs into submission. I made him promise to leave this at home for our walk with Henry at Blakeney Point today.

‘HE’S NOT GOING TO ATTACK ME IS HE?’ he said as Henry jumped out of the boot of my car enthusiastically in the quayside car park.

‘No, no. You’ll be fine,’ I said, and pretty soon the two of them were striding out over the salt marshes together, forty paces ahead of my mum and me. Perhaps in consideration of the immense unspoilt natural beauty of this stretch of the North Norfolk coastline, Henry opted to wait to empty his bowels until we had looped back to the main road, leaving me crouched down on the white line, hurriedly bagging up the contents as a BMW 7 Series came snaking into view at 60mph.

‘WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THAT?’ asked my dad, when I had dragged myself to the grass verge.

‘I’m going to put it inside my bag until I find one of those special dog bins for it,’ I replied.

‘OOH FOOKTIVANO. YOU’RE BLOODY JOKING. THAT’S HORRIBLE.’

It was a hot day, and, though the excrement was double polythened, then placed in the relative cool of my shoulder bag, I felt an acute sense of it changing texture as we walked on. It really did seem an awful long time between dog bins. I chose to remain a model citizen for the time being, and keep the offending item in my bag, but I could definitely see the appeal of hurling it full toss into a nearby field, and the liberation that would follow: me striding off into the sun, a shit-free knapsack on my shoulder, all my worries behind me.

After about five miles, we came to a stile. The fencing was a little low, and Henry looked up at me, expectantly, and I lifted him over.

‘DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO DO THAT?’ said my dad.

‘I do if he can’t go underneath,’ I said. ‘He’s a bit arthritic.’

‘I SUPPOSE YOU COULD SAY YOU WERE DOING IT DOGGY STILE.’

By now I’ve learned that Henry is drawn to loud people and, perhaps for this reason, he tended to gravitate towards my dad. Earlier, as we’d stopped beside the marsh for a picnic, my dad had even shared some pork pie with him. You’d have to know my dad, who is notoriously cautious about sharing meat, even with some of his best friends and closest relatives, to realise what kind of a breakthrough this was. Once again I talked about how well a dog of their own might suit my parents’ lifestyle, and what a great addition it would be to their walks. However, as fond as they seemed of Henry, they seemed unconvinced, and my dad, in particular, didn’t seem to be listening.

‘KEEP IN!’ he shouted as each car passed us on the narrow country lane.

It was an extremely useful instruction, under the circumstances. After all, what with my mum and I not being scheduled to start our first term as primary school pupils for another two months, and not yet having any road sense, either one of us could have wandered blithely out in front of a car at any time without his crucial guardianship.

‘Mick,’ said my mum. ‘You don’t have to shout that every time a car comes.’

‘WHAT? I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. THE TWO OF YOU ARE ALWAYS PICKING ON ME,’ said my dad.

A mile or so later, as we turned onto a heath-land path, I gently suggested that an earlier right turn might have led to an even more scenic route.

‘WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?’ said my dad. ‘I WAS GOING ON COUNTRY WALKS BEFORE YOU WERE BORN.’

He was beginning to sulk now. In retrospect, I probably went too far in following up by asking him if he was ‘the man who invented walking’. I felt guilty, as I always do when I’ve been sarcastic towards him. On the upside, Henry was looking up at him with undiluted admiration. I couldn’t help thinking back to the photos I’d seen of my dad as a teenager, in so many of which he seemed to be pulling a kind of proto-punk, mocking face at the camera, and also of something Hannah had said about Henry: ‘I swear if this dog had fingers on the end of his paws, he’d spend most of his life sticking two of them up.’ Watching them picking up the pace and walking back towards the salt marshes ahead of us and thinking about the dog dazer and the Alsatian bite, you might have initially thought it was an unlikely meeting of the minds, but when you considered it more deeply, there was something very right about it.