Many years ago I had a weekly radio programme, which was axed as part of a network shake-up. There were lots of stories in the papers confidently predicting its demise, so when the executive in charge asked me up to her office after the show one morning, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. Gloriously, the lift got stuck, and since it was full of people, we could not very well have the conversation we both knew was coming. We made painful small talk for the half-hour or so that it took for the engineers to do their thing.
By the time we were finally deposited back on the ground floor I was running late for my next appointment, and politely explained that I would have to go. Could we perhaps meet another time? I made the enquiry sound as innocent as I could, but I was fairly sure she would have left this unpleasant task until the last possible moment, and would be in agony over what to do. It was some small satisfaction to force her into delivering the bad news outside on the pavement, with my taxi’s engine idling nearby.
The call to come into the office to be told I had lost my role as the presenter of the One O’Clock News came while I was Christmas shopping in Harrods, and the bad news about the Today programme reached me in the car park of a hotel in Harrogate, where I had just addressed a literary lunch. Neither of those was funny at the time.
The first hint that the Kudu column was for the chop came when my BlackBerry started pinging with emails at the baggage carousel at Gatwick; one of them was ominously titled ‘CHANGES’. By the time I had got through to the relevant editor I was on the Gatwick Express, so the phone kept cutting out. But I got the message in the end. My broadcasting work had picked up again by then, and when I hung up I reflected that Kudu had, in a characteristically unfussy doggy way, Done his Duty by seeing me through a troubled time, and could retire from literary life with his head held high.
Much to be learnt from taking a dog’s-eye view of things
18 September 2010
In one of the earliest of these columns I introduced Bertie, a wise Border Collie with a remarkable command of the English language. His owner, a distinguished QC, claimed that Bertie could always understand the word ‘ride’. However it was used (‘Let’s go for a ride’ or ‘Let’s go riding’) and whatever the tone (a shout or a whisper), Bertie would always trot off to the tack room for the treat of a horse-led ramble through the Hertfordshire countryside.
Time has rolled on, and Bertie has passed a milestone. One sad day this summer his master (a judge now, so older and wiser himself) invited Bertie out for their usual post-Sunday lunch expedition. Bertie shook his head and retreated to his basket. ‘Dogs know,’ said my friend the lawyer, ‘when it is time to call it a day.’
So does this column. Kudu is retiring from public life, and this will be the last of his regular rambles in the pages of the Saturday Telegraph.
His celebrity has been entirely accidental; these columns were never planned. When I lost my slot on the Today programme, the Telegraph was kind enough to offer me a home here. Had anyone said to me, when I began in journalism more than three decades ago, that I would wind up writing about walking the dog, I should have laughed. But the experience has been unexpectedly rewarding.
As a civilian dog-walker I always suspected that the dog’s-eye view of the world had something unusual to offer. But it was only when I began writing about Kudu’s life that I realized quite how rich the canine perspective can be. There is no field of human endeavour – not art nor politics, not science nor society – which does not yield something new when approached in this way.
Some animal behaviourists recommend that if you really want to understand your dog you should spend an afternoon on your hands and knees, watching the world at skirt level and relishing the proximity of smelly feet and decaying odds and ends that have escaped the broom. Spiritually speaking, that is where I have been for the last sixteen months.
Lobby correspondents are sought out by cabinet ministers with secrets to spill and leaks to spring; in the same way a dog columnist is a magnet for those with good doggy stories to tell. Only this week I picked up a cracking indiscretion doing the rounds in Whitehall: some years ago one of my grander BBC colleagues found himself next to Prince Edward at a social occasion. Searching frantically for something to fill a conversational vacuum, he alighted on the fact that both he and the prince had recently become fathers for the first time. ‘A bit of a shock, this children business,’ he remarked. ‘Not to us,’ came the royal riposte. ‘We had dogs.’
Kudu has taught me something important about journalism. Keats famously defined Shakespeare’s genius as ‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Most of my journalistic career has been, precisely, an ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’. From Kudu I have learnt the value of the imaginative meander – sniffing about where the fancy strikes and (if you will forgive the pun) following a lead, without worrying too much about where it will take me. Kudu stories have a beginning and a middle, but often no particular end.
Earlier this summer this newspaper (among others) reported research that suggested dogs learn to behave like their owners. Since Kudu is generally regarded as a well-mannered and affectionate creature, I remarked to my wife that this reflected well on us. ‘He behaves like you,’ she said, ‘only in that he insists on having his back scratched and snores heavily at night.’
I like to think that he has also picked up an interest in literary work, so the final word goes to him.
*
You cannot imagine what a strain it has been these past months, providing material for my Master’s writing. I know his deadlines, and sometimes I wake up sick with worry.
The celebrity fishbowl is a terrible place to live. I like sitting comfortably upright on the back seat of the car – if I press my nose against the window I can spot the park coming up. But why does that mean I must be described as a ‘plutocratic’ poseur, as I was in the most recent column? Of course I pull on the lead, eat sticks and defecate in embarrassing places – that is what any self-respecting Spaniel does.
What a relief to stop worrying about the literary weight of everything I do. When I sniff a bitch’s bottom I shall no longer wonder whether it might inspire some metaphor or flight of fancy: it will be just what it is – a bitch’s bottom. I can again enjoy the thingness of things.
Yours
Kudu
The Telegraph subs, who, by and large, had been kind to my copy, made two surprising changes to this final flourish. ‘Bitch’s bottom’ became ‘the backside of a passing Schnauzer’, which is not at all the same and suggested a regrettable and uncharacteristic outbreak of prissiness or Political Correctness in the Torygraph newsroom. It annoyingly frustrated my childish ambition to slip a rude phrase into a respectable national broadsheet.
And the reference to Kudu enjoying ‘the thingness of things’ became, intriguingly, ‘I can once again dwell in the thingliness of things, as Heidegger said’.
Clearly, I thought, the work of a philosophy graduate who feels his academic training is undervalued on the subs desk. Heidegger was a Nazi, and the British philosopher Roger Scruton memorably observed that his most important work, Being and Time, ‘is formidably difficult – unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who begins to make sense of it.’ But Heidegger is clearly fascinated by such ideas as the ‘jugness of a jug’, and he wrote extensively on Immanuel Kant and his concept of ‘things-in-themselves’, or noumena.
The term is variously defined as ‘objects as they are in themselves independent of the mind’ or – in a strictly Kantian sense – ‘the things that underlie our experience’ but ‘are not themselves objects of possible experience’ (my italics). That is roughly what I was driving at (at least I think it is). I do not believe that I have the capacity to grasp the essential bitch’s bottomness of a bitch’s bottom, but Kudu, I suspect, do
es. His experience of the world is more direct, less filtered by the intellect. Kudu knows noumena in a way we humans never can.
Dogs are aids to philosophy in the simple sense that their constant demands for walks force one to spend time in a way that is conducive to solitary thought, and in the more subtle sense that regular interaction with another Being encourages one to reflect on the nature of one’s own Being. But they are also what you might call anti-philosophers: they have the capacity to exhibit abstract qualities (affection, concern, loyalty and so on) in an entirely instinctive way, without any of the reflection or agonizing that humans like to engage in when we try to decide how we should act.
Kudu’s contribution to the History of Thought brings to mind Dr Johnson’s famous rebuke to Bishop Berkeley, the father of idealism, or immaterialism, who suggested that things only exist in so far as we perceive them – so that the answer to the conundrum ‘If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?’ must be no. Johnson’s response to this is recorded in Boswell’s Life: ‘After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it – “I refute it thus.” ’
In similar fashion Kudu offers a refutation of Socrates, who declared that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Kudu lives just such a life (the fact that it is endlessly examined by me does not count) but it is self-evidently – resplendently, indeed – worth living.
Acknowledgements
In dark moments I have cringed at my own presumption in imagining that people would be interested in me and my dog, and I am grateful to those who have kept faith with a project that might easily have been dismissed as preposterous. Rhidian Wynn-Davies originally championed the column at the Daily Telegraph, Vivienne Schuster, my tireless agent, saw the potential for a book, and Susanna Wadeson, my editor at Transworld, showed me – very tactfully – how to shape the material into one.
My writing has often been improved by a loyal team of readers and editors at the kitchen table and in the Telegraph newsroom, and most of all I owe gratitude to those who have supplied the stories, the dog-walkers of Battersea and Clapham first among them. Anne Whiteside, who walks Kudu when I am away, deserves special mention for taking such wonderfully good care of him. David Nissan and Gwyneth Williams nurtured him during the first weeks of his life, so this book really could not have been written without them; when their litter was broken up they kept one of Kudu’s sisters, Mielie, for themselves, and we heard with great sadness that she had died of pancreatitis at the tender age of three and a half.
I have quoted widely from the canon of dog literature, and would like to thank the following authors and estates for permission to use their works: In Search of Fatima © 2002, Ghada Karmi, Verso Books; Spies of the Balkans © 2010, Alan Furst, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group, London; Man Meets Dog by Konrad Lorenz ©1983, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich, Germany; Inside of a Dog © 2009 by Alexandra Horowitz, Simon and Schuster; Dogs and Their Ancestors by Mrs Neville Lytton, printed with permission of The Earl of Lytton; My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley © 1965, Methuen, London; The Old Brown Dog © 1985, Coral Lansbury, The University of Wisconsin Press.
About the Author
Edward Stourton is the author of five previous books. He is a newspaper columnist, writer and presenter of several high-profile current affairs programmes and documentaries for radio and television, and regularly presents BBC Radio Four programmes such as The World at One, The World this Weekend, Sunday and Analysis. He is a frequent contributor to the Today programme, where for ten years he was one of the main presenters.
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DIARY OF A DOG-WALKER
A DOUBLEDAY BOOK: 9780857520074
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