Along with Jeff Bezos and the Chinese Communist Party, the real winners of the past year have been dogs. You might have noticed more of the animals on your daily permitted travels, and it’s not just your imagination — under the loneliness and despair of lockdown, huge numbers of people have got dogs. There is even a dog in the White House again — two in fact, Major and Champ — after four years of the notoriously caninephobic Trump. And of those tens of thousands of new dog owners, many — especially when lockdown is over — will realise they have made a terrible mistake. I speak from experience.
The dog issue in our family had been a growing controversy for some time, but I had never expected it to become a real one. I refused every plea. We have three children in a not-very-big flat, so compact that all of them were in the same room for a while. Why on earth would I want yet another living creature to look after? More responsibility? More reasons to be woken up in the night?
But then, just once, when I had had maybe slightly too much to drink, I said it would be fine and maybe it was even a good idea. By the time I came to my senses and relented, it was too late: the wheels were in motion, like the build-up to war. There was no stopping it.
I’m not a natural dog person. I grew up in Zone 2, in a flat, and for 11 years we had a cat, Suzie — who I wasn’t wild about, if I’m honest. My only experience of looking after a dog was occasionally taking my father-in-law’s elderly Dalmatian for a walk on Hampstead Heath. We had a few miserable strolls in the rain during which Jasper would crouch down and deliver an almighty deposit out of his grotesque canine digestive system, a monstrous Mordor of a place filled with sulphur and God-knows-what toxins. Jasper would then wait there, giving me a look as if to say, “well it’s not going to pick itself up, is it?” And on we would go.
Alas Jasper is now in the great hall feasting with his ancestors, and my wife’s extended family — many of whom live nearby — longed for a replacement. They’re dog people: they crave the companionship and the love the animal gives you, the dog-chat about dog things, even the dog smell. It leaves me cold.
My wife started browsing those websites where they advertise homeless animals from the Mediterranean and former Soviet bloc, who are then shipped away from their hellish existence on the streets of Kiev or Chișinău and taken in by families in Remain-voting areas of southern England. Our future pet had been found along with her five siblings just outside Lisbon, orphaned after the horrendous forest fires of summer 2018. They were lucky: all six of them ended up being flown over to England, where they found homes somewhere between Crouch End and Bristol.
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