by Tom Cox
‘It’s like I told Tom after I’d first met Henry,’ Dee said to Hannah. ‘“You’ll love this spaniel. He’s almost exactly like you, only he’s a spaniel.’”
It wasn’t the first time I’d been compared to a dog, and in this specific instance, I could see the physical evidence on hand. Since my mid-teens, I’ve had dark, thickish curly hair. Over recent years this has receded slightly at the temples, leaving something of a fluffy peninsula at the front; I can assure you that it’s 100 per cent natural, but I suppose, in spaniel vernacular, you could call it my own sort of dogwig. I was fine with that. Still, considering that the observation had come from the person I spent most of my time with, and who had also just used the term ‘simpleton’ and ‘galumphing’ in describing Henry, I could not help dwelling on it slightly, as we walked home.
23 January 2009
I hear from Hannah that, on his walks, as he passes The Upside Down House, Henry has been pulling her towards the front door. I could hardly believe this could be the case, as he’d only been to visit us once, but as I brought him down to my car, from Hannah’s house, before setting off on our first walk together alone, he seemed to know where he was going. I decided not to let him in, for fear of alienating the cats, who already seem to sense something is not quite right.
Henry, I’m told, can get a little bit antsy in the car when traffic is slow, tending to howl whenever Hannah’s speedometer slips below 30mph: a kind of dog version of the movie Speed, but with a spaniel instead of a bomb and a Nissan Micra in place of a bus. If so, he was on good behaviour, only beginning to whimper impatiently as we arrived at our destination, Dunwich, on the Suffolk coast.
One of my New Year’s resolutions four weeks ago was to try to complete fifty-two East Anglian walks of four miles or above, in an attempt to get to know my local area better, an endeavour for which I have purchased a deerstalker hat, and grown a winter beard. They say the most important part of the body to keep warm is the head and this hat is so absurdly furry, I sense that it doesn’t actually matter what I’m wearing, I’ll still be warm in it. This is, however, a theory I’m somewhat reluctant to test out in full.
One thing I’ve noticed about being a lone bearded man, walking through remote countryside wearing novelty headgear, is that you are not always automatically viewed as a wholesome figure. You can tell from the shift of your fellow walkers’ gaze as you pass them. Add a dog to the equation, however, and everything changes. As I walked Henry along the beach at Dunwich, everyone I saw stopped to exchange hearty hellos with us. ‘Is he a springer?’ a fellow spaniel-walker, a ruddy-cheeked, blonde lady in wellies and a Barbour jacket, asked.
‘No, just a big cocker,’ I replied, with a certain smug sense of assurance.
That I can now utter phrases like ‘big cocker’ without feeling the need to giggle is perhaps a measure of how far I’ve already come in my short time as a dog walker. Nevertheless, I remained nervous about further questioning from the Barbour-jacketed lady. What if she asked me about what products I used to clean him, or where I got his lead? I am unconvinced that my bluffing would be able to withstand such interrogation. I am also aware that when I call Henry, and put him back on his lead, I am not just doing so to prevent problematic encounters between him and other dogs; I am also doing so to prevent scenarios where, by being forced to make conversation with doggy types, my phoniness will be revealed.
I’m usually pretty good at getting Henry re-leashed, and he does always tend to scuttle back to me the second or third time I call him, but upon spotting a Labrador on the woodland track back from the Dunwich marshes, I acted a little slowly. There was a small barking exchange, and the Lab’s owner and I exchanged a nervous glance, before the Lab wibbled off, visibly upset, and Henry scuttled back to me. I noticed three main thoughts going round my head as I wandered back to the car:
1. ‘I probably would have handled that better if I hadn’t owned cats instead of dogs my whole life.’
2. ‘I must watch out for Henry’s bullying streak.’
3. ‘My dog kicked another, bigger dog’s butt. Awesome!’
12 February 2009
Hannah and I seem to have come to a happy arrangement very easily, regarding Henry’s walks. When Hannah is away on a business trip, I will do my best to walk Henry, and can pretty much walk him any other time I please, so long as I give her at least a day’s notice. Hannah seems grateful for this, which is odd, since it’s she who’s doing me the larger favour. The bonuses are twofold: I get a quick-fix confidence boost for when my cats are treating me even more like a doormat than usual, and dog ownership without the hassle – or so it would seem. Yes, I have to pick up Henry’s excrement, and reward him with biscuits and chews, but I do not have to clean Henry, buy food for him, take care of his vet bills, or listen to his whining at night. As someone who’s toyed with the idea of getting a dog recently, I also am getting a perfect trial run for dog ownership.
This is not to say that I am able to keep my time with Henry completely compartmentalised from the rest of my life. During today’s walk near Burnham Overy Staithe, on the North Norfolk coast, Henry jumped into the river several times, and smelled distinctly ripe in the car afterwards. Later, having dropped Henry home, I collected my friends Steve and Sue from the train station. Our subsequent conversation is the second time I have apologised for the fact that my car ‘smells of spaniel’.
28 February 2009
Henry pissed on his paws again this afternoon. I’m told by Dee that this is because he has a slightly arthritic hip, and cannot cock his leg properly. To be frank, I’m still coming to terms with spending time with an animal who is not entirely self-sufficient, in terms of his own bowel functions, and further alarm comes from his habit of taking a dump in the exact middle of country lanes, usually a matter of seconds before a four-by-four comes haring around the nearest bend. Today, a few miles south of Norwich, near the village of Loddon, I was almost mown down by a Range Rover as I dived for Henry’s excrement, baggy in hand, and rolled skillfully over into a roadside ditch. Henry, however, appeared unmoved by the incident, and raced off to intimidate some ducks. There’s still a part of me that, as I carry his poo in a plastic bag, in my coat pocket, is asking myself, ‘You mean people actually choose to do this? Every day?’ Sometimes, as we walk, I’ll forget about the bag, and think about how the brisk Broadland breeze feels against my skin, or admire a scarecrow in a nearby field, but my sense of its presence never fully goes away and, somehow, as I walk further, that presence seems to expand, until I feel I am walking with not just one living creature, but two.
18 March 2009
Number of animals encountered on walk today by Henry and me: seventeen. Number of animals wound up by Henry: fourteen.
24 March 2009
When Henry and I walk locally, there are now various neighbourhood dogs we have come to recognise. For these, we like to make-up appropriate nicknames. Well, I say, ‘we’; I obviously mean ‘I’, but I feel that, if Henry could make up nicknames for his canine rivals, he would take great pleasure in doing so. I suppose he’s quite a lippy, boisterous dog, and I can see that his goading and cheek can get easily on the nerves of a snotty Dalmatian or a well-heeled wolfhound, but at least he’s not aloof or imperious in any way, and is as happy to say hello to a Jack Russell as he is to a greyhound. This is more than I can say for the Janetdog, so named by me because of its striking resemblance to my cat Janet. The Janetdog strutted past us, snout in the air, fluffy tail high, this afternoon and you could just tell we were no more than a couple of dirty specks on its radar. This seems pretty rich, coming from a creature that looks like one of the most brainless felines in East Anglia.
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 e
ars. 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 o
f 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.