The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  Six months after the puppies were born, Max ran to the door when my sister’s friend came over and attacked her. She had 16 stitches in her hand. The “Welcome” mat was so covered in blood we had to throw it away. Max was put down. Saffron got ill and died a year later.

  The day after, I sat in the garden with my siblings, on top of the grave that now had three dogs in it.

  “When we grow up, we will never, ever have dogs,” we vowed. “Never. Never. We will learn from our parents’ mistake.”

  Everything about having those two dogs had been awful. Awful. They were the wrong dogs, and we were the wrong people, and we had done everything wrong, and something this bad could not happen again.

  That is how we were dog people — and then not dog people.

  Twenty-five years later, and my daughter wants a dog. She is a dog person. She is an “all animals” person. She has tropical fish, a cat, and two pet rats — Ringo and Bingo — that she has trained to sit in the hood of her coat, while she sits at the piano, playing them Billy Joel and the Beatles. They run up and down her arms, as she plays jazzy fifths. Sometimes, they land on a key.

  “I have a band of musical rats,” she says, as they arduously wade from “C” to “G”. “And I love them. But I can’t take them anywhere. I want to go walking. I want to go out.”

  For Christmas, I buy her two tiny rat harnesses, so she can take them for a walk. She spends half an hour putting them into the harnesses. The rats immediately wriggle out of the harnesses. You cannot take rats out.

  “Why can’t we have a dog?” she says, sadly putting the harnesses in the charity-shop bag. “Families should have a dog. That’s what families do. You had a dog when you were 13. Why can’t I?”

  Why would we not have a dog? Because the dog might be a problem. The dog might make life worse. The dog might be unhappy. The dog might hurt her. The dog might break our hearts. The dog might be the wrong dog, and we the wrong people. We might do dogs wrong.

  “We could take other people’s dogs for a walk,” I say, signing up to borrowmydoggy.com.

  “But the point of a dog is it’s yours,” she says, quite correctly. “You love it, and it loves you, and it’s happy when you come home, and it sleeps on your bed, and you go everywhere, on adventures. You wouldn’t borrow someone else’s child. A dog — a proper dog — is your dog.”

  Perhaps a very old dog is the answer. I don’t say this to her, but maybe if we got a dog that was going to … die soon? So however bad it got, the problem would be over in a year? We start looking on dog rescue sites, and then dog shelters, looking for something small, gentle and old. Ideally with a caption on it, reading: “Life expectancy: nine life-enhancing, yet short, months.”

  But all we see is boisterous Staffies and nervous greyhounds. Those are the unwanted dogs of the 21st century, in endless excess. We know people with both, who love them dearly but they are simply not the dogs for us. It would be wrong for them and us. I can’t afford to make a mistake again. I am, simply, scared.

  One very long day, we go all the way to Durham to see Bruno, who appears on the website to be a gentle, medium-sized hound, part-labrador, part-terrier.

  When we get there, he’s the size of a horse, barks incessantly and pulls so hard on his lead, he drags Nancy over.

  “I’m going to teach you a word from my childhood. ‘Savving.’ That dog is ‘savving’,” I tell her.

  The train journey home is four long hours. We eat crisps, and Nancy looks sad, and I think, “Oh come on, just f *** it. You know you’re going to get a dog — people don’t go to Durham if they’re not getting a dog. So do it properly. Commit. Don’t make this girl have an old, mad, unhappy dog — like you did. Don’t accidentally repeat history! Give her a puppy. Start from scratch. Believe you can make a good dog. Put some effort into it.”

  She’s called Luna. She’s the size of a child’s mitten and the colour of dune sand. Her eyes aren’t open yet, and she sits on Nancy’s hand as content as a baby bird. Luna is a week old. We’re in a house in Norfolk, because Luna’s mother is a silver and black spaniel with liquid eyes, who radiates such an intense aura of love that, in other countries, she would be worshipped as a dog god and garlanded with flowers.

  “Always go by the mother,” experts stress on their websites. “That is the greatest guarantee of your puppy’s personality.”

  That is what I have done here. I have found the sweetest mother dog in the world — the spanielest spaniel of all time. The father, meanwhile, is a small, merry poodle.

  There is a slight problem here, because this makes Luna, technically, a cockapoo, something I find difficult for two reasons.

  The first is that the word “cockapoo” is simply a terrible word — it’s the word “cock” and the word “poo”, but for a dog. It might as well be called a “knobaplop”, for all the dignity it has. When I find out that they call them “sproodles” in Australia, I decide that this is what I, stubbornly, will refer to her as. A sproodle sounds like a mad noodle, far more dignified. I will never say “cockapoo”.

  The second difficulty is that cockapoos are, apparently, regarded as the least cool dog you can possibly buy. They are the thunderously predictable middle-class choice of dog in the 21st century. Hypoallergenic, due to their poodle fur; small; gentle; easy to train; disinclined to bark or chase other animals. They are the Waitrose of dogs. The Boden. The Adele. Hipsters have pugs or French bulldogs; the properly posh have labradors; the dedicated dog lovers rescue Staffies and bring out their good natures. But cockapoos — they are the boring, safe, slightly smug choice of middle-class families. I rail against this for a while, before my husband points out that I have spent my entire life trying to become a boring, safe, slightly smug middle-class family, and that it’s too late to suddenly fight this now.

  I know cockapoos are not cool, because I know everything about dogs now. As those with chaotic childhoods do, I’ve decided that total control is the answer: I have spent three months researching dogs, breeds, breeders, training methods, food, poo bags, collars v harnesses, crating and the astonishing range of snacks and chews available for the modern dog. In my day, dogs did not have “chews”. They found a shoe and made do.

  The modern dog, by way of contrast, appears to live in a chewtopia, with bull’s pizzles, stuffed cow’s hooves and sections of deer antler to gnaw on. It seems there is no animal on earth not offered up, in sections, to lucky pet dogs, by way of chewing gum. I’m surprised there is no Puppy Rhino Horn website. Perhaps there is. I would probably buy one, if there were. I’ve bought everything else. The house looks like a dog equipment warehouse. I am prepared.

  “We’re just going to look at Luna,” I warned Nancy, before we left. “It’s not certain we’ll keep her. Maybe she’s not the dog for us. We’ll know when we see Our Dog. We won’t just get the first cute puppy we see.”

  Looking at Nancy — sitting stock still, stroking the tiny golden dome of Luna’s sleeping head with one finger; examining the miniature, pink, as yet unused paws and gingernut-coloured ears the size of a fingernail — there’s only one thing left to happen.

  “Can we keep her? Is she ours?” Nancy whispers.

  “Yes.”

  We get the first cute puppy we see.

  Seven weeks later, and we bring her home.

  I’d like to pretend it’s a simple, relaxed homecoming, but it’s not — not really. Still fearful that I might be bringing chaos and awfulness into our lives, I’ve hidden every shoe in the house (because of chewing), erected training crates on every floor (to teach her separation), arduously planned the one square metre of paving in the garden the dog is allowed to toilet on (so she doesn’t bugger up my beautiful lawn) and warned everyone, “This will be hard work. HARD WORK. We can’t stint for a moment on training — or else she will end up a nightmare dog everyone will hate! EVERYONE MUST PILE IN!”

  As a consequence of this, my elder daughter has spent the last two months warning us she will hate the dog. �
��I don’t like dogs,” she says, unhappily. “I will not have anything to do with it. I’m not going to feed it or touch it. It’s your dog. I will have nothing to do with it.”

  When Luna arrives — exhausted after the three-hour drive from Norfolk, during which she has been sick three times on the beatifically smiling Nancy, who wipes it up with the unperturbed calm of an NHS nurse — she totters into the front room on her tiny rabbit legs and heads straight for a shoe.

  “WHO LEFT A SHOE IN HERE! THE SHOE WILL BE EATEN!” I roar.

  Luna simply climbs into the shoe and falls asleep looking like a tiny curl of fur, tail over her nose. She is absurdly small.

  “Oh my God, I love her,” Lizzie whispers. “Can she sleep on my bed tonight?”

  “She’s my dog, she’s sleeping on my bed tonight,” Nancy says, indignantly.

  “She will sleep IN THE TRAINING CRATE — we will teach her INDEPENDENCE AND NON-NEEDINESS,” I say. “THIS IS AN ABSOLUTELY UNBREAKABLE RULE.”

  The girls look at the training crate — vast and crate-y — and then at the tiny dog. I look at the tiny dog.

  The tiny dog sleeps, that night, on Nancy’s pillow making tiny puppy “Iff! Iff! Iff!” barks in her sleep. We all sit on Nancy’s bed, staring at her, smiling, for two hours. Whispering, so we don’t wake her up. “She’s the most beautiful dog in the world,” Lizzie says. “She is our dog. We found her.”

  The dog sleeps on Nancy’s bed every night.

  I had prepared for a psychological and practical battle: a momentous upheaval of our lives, a potential threat in our house.

  Within a day, it’s clear that this is not what this tiny dog is. This tiny dog is … joy. She arrives on the first day of April, just as spring is filling the garden with a haze of tiny, unfurling, exquisite buds, and that’s what she is, too: a tiny, unfurling thing. She totters around on her tiny, unused legs, looking like a miniature Falkor the Luck Dragon from The NeverEnding Story, and sits under the maple tree staring in wonder at her own paws.

  When she does her first “Woof”, it’s a tiny, clockwork-mouse “Woof” that surprises her so much, she falls over backwards. We spend the rest of the day saying “Woof” to each other, in tiny voices, like Luna. All we want to do is woof now and fall over. She has replaced all our words with “woof”. “Woof” means everything.

  She falls into her water bowl and has to be scooped out; she falls asleep while she eats, head resting on a pillow of chopped meat. After her adventures — running away from a ball, alarmed; curiously chewing a puppy-training book — she likes to climb right up your body, while you’re watching TV, and fall asleep on your shoulder. When she licks your ear with her tiny, pink tongue, you wonder why there is no such saying as, “Delightful as being licked on the ear by a puppy.” There is, surely, nothing so purely happy.

  She is not a tiny dog, really, but a whole new place instead: the house is utterly transformed. It’s as if all the doors and windows have been opened, and blown our old, sadder, duller lives away. We have invited into it something that every ten minutes or so does something that makes everyone coo, or sigh, or laugh. We are like kings, with a new jester — an entire court in thrall to her tiny-dog life.

  She shakes up our whole day, and the pieces settle in a better order. In the mornings, she is carried downstairs to do her business, and the whole family sit around, on the patio, drinking tea, bleary-eyed, and cheering, “Good girl to do wee-wee,” when she does her proud, shaky squat. The lawn is absolutely buggered — she scorches all the grass with her wee — and I couldn’t care less. I’m so proud of her toilet training that each straw-like circle looks like a gold star, for achievement.

  In the evenings — long and golden now, as we head into May — the whole family take her for a walk, to Alexandra Palace Park. Two teenage girls! On a nightly walk! Willingly! Wandering along in the sunshine and the rain, casually chatting in a way I thought we’d left behind in their childhood. We’ve lived here 13 years, but it takes having a dog to finally give you all a … reason to wander. We discover a lake we never knew. A wood. A meadow.

  “God, London is beautiful,” I sigh — something I should have known, but had no reason to, until a tiny dog needed to run around in it.

  I thought she would make our lives smaller — bound by her schedule and needs — but, instead, she’s opened us out to the world like a pop-up book. Everything that seemed like it might be a problem turns into a bonus. What happens next year, when we go to visit Pete’s family in Greece? We can’t fly with her.

  “Let’s drive there, instead — a road trip. With Luna!” Nancy says, starting to draw the route on a map on the wall. “We can show her the Alps!”

  A child that previously had no interest in the Alps is now thrilled to show them to a dog. She starts learning the history of Italy, “so I can tell Luna, when we’re there. I don’t want her to be an ignorant dog.”

  What about the impact on our social lives: she can’t be left alone, when she’s so young? “Oh, I like taking her for walks,” Nancy says, cheerfully. “Boys come up and play with her — and they’re not trying to be ‘street’, like usual. They just squeal, ‘Look at the cute dog!’ — like girls — and then talk about their dogs. I like it. It’s like joining a new club. Dog Club.”

  Of course, she’s only five months old, and still learning, so there are still occasional puddles of wee on the landing, and walks where she sees another cockapoo — cockapoos love other cockapoos — and won’t come back: running around like a lunatic as we call her name, before finally slinking over with a “Sorry guys, just had to sort out a bit of business” look on her face. But she’s such an amiable, soppy, friendly thing that the idea of those uncontrollable, unhappy German shepherds seems like a bad, mad dream.

  My siblings recently came over, to meet her for the first time. “Don’t get a dog,” they had warned, in advance. “You know what happens with dogs.”

  Ten minutes later, they were rolling around on the lawn with her.

  “This dog … This dog is nice,” they marvelled.

  After three months, I’m at Nancy’s school concert, with the dog asleep in a bag at my feet — not stirring, even for the timpani — and I whisper to my husband, “There isn’t going to be a hard bit, is there? This isn’t traumatic at all! Having a dog can be … easy.”

  “If it’s the right dog,” he says, kissing my head. “If it’s the right dog, for you.”

  THE CONSERVATIVES ARE CRIMINALLY INCOMPETENT

  Matthew Parris

  JULY 29 2017

  IF YOU’VE A moment, research “Mike the headless chicken” (April 20, 1945 to March 17, 1947). Mike passed away 70 years ago but had managed to live headless (sort of) for 18 months, staggering pointlessly around to the amazement and horror of spectators in many fairgrounds, before finally choking.

  Returning to Britain on Thursday I had been wondering what our Conservative government now reminds me of, when a friend told me of Mike’s sad story. Can this really be Britain? Or has my homecoming ferry re-routed itself to a Central American banana republic where the congreso nacional has packed up for the summer holidays, the foreign minister has gone cavorting in Australia, the stop-gap president has departed to walk in Switzerland, the hairy Marxist resistance leader has started wrestling his own comandantes and the lugubrious Don Felipe, minister of finance, is staging a slow-motion coup?

  Humour, though, is no longer a refuge from the disgrace. What have we come to? Like some dark moon below the horizon, a rogue force is wrenching us from our orbit, and nobody knows what to do.

  But if you think the purpose of this column is to lament that crazy Brexit decision, you are wrong. Brexit or no Brexit, I have a different focus. A more precise focus than the scattergun commentary that has interested itself in “Britain’s” embarrassment, “the government’s” incompetence, “Whitehall’s” ill-preparedness, “the prime minister’s” inadequacy, “Labour’s” disunity or even “Europe’s” aggressiveness.

>   There is a main culprit here, and it isn’t any of these candidates. Labour didn’t cause this mess. Whitehall didn’t frame the task, even if it is ill-equipped for its execution. Theresa May may not be up to the job but it’s a job into which she has been forced. And “the government”? The government is a collection of individuals. Where do these individuals come from? Who nominated them? Who keeps them in their jobs? Search for the key word in the following text.

  We live in a parliamentary democracy in which voters elect representatives attached to parties. The party as an institution has form, and voice, and policies. The party chooses a leader. The winning party’s leader asks the monarch for authority to govern and if she is satisfied that the party can support its leader in commanding the Commons, she gives it. The leader then chooses every minister from the party’s ranks, and leads a cabinet drawn, too, from the party. And if the party loses confidence in its leader or government, it can, by withdrawing support, dismiss both.

  The word that keeps appearing in this passage is hard to miss: an entity, a real thing, the thing that’s now in charge of Britain’s direction. It’s called a party. It’s the Conservative Party. Do the voters even begin to understand how this mess is entirely of the Conservative Party’s creation?

  The Tories are turning Brexit into a humiliating shambles. They called a referendum when they didn’t have to, they accepted the result, they willed Brexit, they promised Brexit, and now they’re comprehensively failing to organise it. You can’t blame the voters, who quite reasonably assumed that the Tories would never have offered a referendum if they hadn’t thought leaving Europe could be arranged. The fingerprints for this crime of mismanagement are Tory fingerprints.