by Tom Cox
‘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.
3 August 2009
Email from my mum: ‘Lovely to see you. Was really great meeting Henry. We both loved him. We’re actually thinking of getting a dog now. Your dad thinks it would really suit our lifestyle, in a way, and make our walks even more interesting.’
Sent reply: ‘Really? I suppose I had never thought of it that way. I probably should have suggested it.’
7 August 2009
Have not seen Henry for a few days and am, just for the first time, missing him slightly. Received update from Hannah, to tide me over: a photograph of him happily licking an ice cream, and the news that, yesterday, he attempted to swing from her CEO’s tie.
10 August 2009
Further Henry update from Hannah, who has now noticed that all the executives at work have started tucking their ties into their trousers, and fears it may not be just a trend.
14 August 2009
Update from mum: my dad has decided not to get a dog after all, having been slightly harassed by a Dobermann on today’s walk, but has, instead, bought a really fat new fish for his pond.
17 August 2009
Henry attempted to eat a man’s chips today on the seafront at Aldeburgh. ‘Get down, Henry!’ I shouted, surprising myself with my authority.
‘Yes, Henry, I’m afraid I can’t give you any of these,’ said the man, politely. I apologised, he complimented Henry on his red eyes, and pointed out his own dog, a Dachshund, who was up ahead, gambolling in the surf with his wife. Each time I walk Henry I am more aware of the way he connects me to my fellow humans. When you walk alone in the countryside, you are a bit of loose debris floating through the abyss, but when you walk with a dog, that debris becomes a sticky bud with the potential to briefly or not so briefly fasten itself to someone else. While walking Henry, I realise that those romantic comedies where souls collide in the local park over a fracas between the male party’s Coonhound and the female party’s Beagle are not just the stuff of Hollywood fantasy. They can really happen! It only remains a shame, perhaps, that I am not in the market for a 17-stone, married, bald man with an oversized 1980s ski jacket and a probable connection with the Countryside Alliance.
29 August 2009
Possible entry for Dog Dictionary: ‘Unitard: a uniquely lovable kind of retard.’
5 September 2009
I remain fascinated as to why every time Henry jumps in a broad or river or dyke or marsh, no matter how deep or dirty, he smells precisely the same. Surely Norfolk and Suffolk’s waterways have a mind-bogglingly eclectic variety of pollution, dead insects, animal death juice, excrement and rainwater in them? Hence, they would each have their own original smells. So how come, having reacted with Henry, they always result in the same damp doggy pong: an odour that, though not evil, has a boisterousness about it that tends to pen a person in. My feeling is that this is a distinction to be proud of, in dog terms. I suppose you could look at Henry as a kind of olfactory version of the unique and mesmerising actor Christopher Walken: you can put him with any kind of accompaniment, however watered down, but you’re still going to know he’s Henry.
17 September 2009
After what happened to Henry when he raided Hannah’s parents’ bin earlier in the year, I’m very vigilant about watching his eating habits, which, from what I can work out, seem to extend to anything that isn’t another dog or a human, but sometimes I’m just not quick enough. My cats will vigilantly check any foodstuff offered to them for poison, arsenic and poor craftsmanship before proceeding, but Henry’s packed itinerary does not allow for that. During our latest walk, he not only licked the trunk of a tree, but managed to consume something unidentifiable in a chip wrapper that almost certainly wasn’t chips, and a half-eaten Cornish pasty bought from the Westward Ho! branch of the Co-op on a golf holiday of mine seven weeks previously, which had somehow secreted itself beneath the divider in the boot of my car. This, however, might be less of a damning comment about Henry’s diet than it is about how my standards of automobile maintenance have slipped since becoming a part-time spaniel walker.
28 September 2009
Today my friend Jess and I went for a walk with Henry, and Jess’s farm collie, Spartacus, at Knettishall Heath, on the edge of Thetford Forest. The two dogs got on pretty well, and it was clear that Spartacus wasn’t going to let any of Henry’s lip get to him. As my first dual dog walk, it was instructive in showing me just how far I’ve travelled as a dog borrower, but just what little distance I’ve really come. I made a perfunctory effort at shouting Henry back for
the first mile, but by the time we’d walked for half an hour, I’d happily ceded the disciplining of both dogs to Jess. Jess is a vet, hence kills things almost every day, so she’s made of tougher stuff than me, but I sense the situation would have been the same with 99 per cent of fellow dog owners. Dogs see me as a kindred idiot spirit, I sense, but I’m also sure they can see through my half-hearted attempts to be their master. This goes right back to the time I was ten, and used to hang out in the garden of my neighbour Dorothy Cope, and wrestle with her black Labrador, Bella, and whippet-cross, Millie: a playful meeting of equals, rather than an early exercise in command and control. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time with Henry now, but I’m not sure I’m any closer to actually wanting a dog of my own; I just know I really like having a dog of my own to borrow.
3 October 2009
Today could well be the last warm day of the year, so, perhaps rather ambitiously, I took Henry to the village of Blythburgh, for a special, nine-mile Black Shuck walk. Shuck is a legend of the Suffolk coast: a ghostly black dog, the size of a small horse, who roamed the nearby countryside from pre-Viking times, and, in 1577, broke into Blythburgh Church, terrorising the congregation and killing two of its number. As I looked at what are allegedly the scratch marks he left on the north door, I wondered if my own borrowed black dog would be capable of anything similar. It seemed unlikely, though I could definitely picture him being quite intimidating in his mission to steal the parishioners’ postservice cakes and muffins.
Our walk took us on a loop inland, then back towards the coast, following the River Blyth. Midway, we stopped at a deserted pub whose owners had kindly put a bowl of water outside the front door to appease thirsty passing black dogs. I’ve been walking Henry for nine months now, and I still haven’t been brave enough to tie him up outside a shop or a pub yet. This is because, as a rule, I view knots with suspicion, and tend to shy away from them if given the opportunity. With this in mind, I attempted to carry a pint of Adnams bitter and some cheese and chive flavoured crisps in one hand, while wielding Henry’s lead from the other. In retrospect, it was probably for the best that half of my drink ended up on the floor, as I was quite tired by this point, and needed all my faculties for the remainder of the walk.
One of the best things about the route I’d chosen is that the spire of Blythburgh church, where the walk had begun and ended, serves as a marker. As Henry and I walked towards it, even he looked a little fatigued, which I’d previously thought impossible. I’d worn the wrong kind of socks with my normally comfortable walking boots, and I could feel a blister on my heel swelling with, and possibly leaking, blood. The spire came closer and closer into view, but something seemed wrong about the directions: there’d been no left turn through the reeds where I’d imagined it and, with the River Blyth continuing on our left with no break, there appeared to be no alternative footpath.
I’ve learned by now that my walking books are not always factually correct in their distances. Also, the AA series of British walkers’ manuals, in particular, can get a little emotive in their language sometimes. ‘Strike out across a field’ always seems a rather dramatic description of the act of walking diagonally, at a rather sedate pace, across some mud scattered with rotten cabbages. Meanwhile, ‘jig left, then right, passing curious sows in their pens’ is downright hysterical, unless you’re one of that special breed of ramblers who spontaneously explodes into dance every time you see an inquisitive pig. But I tend to let that kind of thing go. This, however, was ridiculous: wherever we looked, Henry and I could not find a footpath. For almost an hour we wandered aimlessly through reeds and river meadows, looking for a way across the river. As we did so, the grey spire of Black Shuck’s church served as a kind of doomful upright rainbow: we walked towards it, but we never got any closer.
Never having owned dogs, but having a fair appreciation of fictional canines, I was hoping that Henry might take charge of the situation, perhaps angling his head, saying ‘Rowwwf?’ then ‘Rowwwf rowwf!’ and leading me to safety, but he didn’t seem too concerned, and preoccupied himself with jumping repeatedly in the river and making a nearby heron soil itself. It would be dark in under two hours, a dusk chill was already in the air, and the pain in my foot had become so excruciating, I had taken my shoes off to reveal a grey sock soaked completely red. But what if I became stranded out here in the dark? I was suddenly acutely aware of my status as a single person. Who would I send my SOS message to? In desperation, I posted a message on the social networking site Twitter: ‘Lost in Suffolk countryside. If this is the last you hear from me, please let it be known that “Fairground” by Simply Red was my least favourite song of all time.’
I was, though, genuinely worried; I was not just responsible for me, but for a dog who – if there wasn’t a chip shop in the vicinity – seemed to have little concept of fending for himself.
Finally, buried amid some bullrushes, I found a sign, explaining that, due to the river walls breaking down, the footpaths in the area had been flooded and lost. The only available route back to the car involved turning back the way we’d come and taking a four-mile detour. Upon reaching the last couple of stiles, Henry looked weary, for the first time since I’d known him, and I obligingly carried him over them. By the time we reached the car, we’d walked fourteen miles in total, and the sky above Black Shuck’s church was dark and foreboding, although perhaps not as dark and foreboding as my blister, which from a cursory glance, now measured exactly one-and-a-half times the size of my foot. By chance, as I pulled out of the car park, the shuffle function on my iPod selected the song ‘Black Shuck’ by the rock band The Darkness, who originally hail from down the road from here. ‘Black Shuck!’ howled the singer, in his rock falsetto. The next line was a rhyming reference to the thing that the dog in question didn’t give: a popular Anglo-Saxon curse word, with Germanic roots, still in common use today. Behind me, in the back seat, my own temporary black dog slept through it all – a much more positive influence than the black dogs of legend, but evidently in his own way equally capable of not giving the same thing.
Some Random Selections from
the Cat Dictionary
Air Scratch
To flail wildly and absurdly at the air with one’s back leg as one’s owner attempts to ‘help’ scratch an itch that, in all honesty, thanks all the same and everything, you had perfectly well covered. Some say the air scratch is not as involuntary as it seems, and is actually an obscene gesture whose roots stretch back as far as ancient Egypt: a kind of feline version of a two-fingered salute, but much, much ruder. Others just decry it as another forlorn symbol of man’s increasing interference in cat culture, a debasement of nature that will ultimately send us on a road to a dark place where a word like ‘natural’ no longer even has any meaning.
Catgut
The quality of feline true grit in the face of adversity. For example: managing to stoically wait out the twenty minutes between the biscuit dispenser becoming empty and your human serf abandoning his overdue, half-finished piece of journalism to hotfoot it down to the pet store for replacement supplies.
DSDASIGHGDSHSDDC
Feline scholars are split upon estimating when the ancient language of dsdasighgdshsddc first emerged. Some put the date around about 1983, during the rise of the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum home computers. Others claim that techno geek cats in San Francisco’s South Park district were communicating in it as far back as 1974. Whatever the case, it is generally agreed that dsdasighgdshsddc has been in regular use since the early 90s. While often written off by humans as a random, unintentional series of letters generated by the patter of mischievous paws across a keyboard, what many people don’t know is that dsdasighgdshsddc actually forms an entire exclamatory, often insult-heavy, feline language: a kind of profane moggy binary, if you like, being sent to other cats across the globe via a complex email system invisible to the human eye. Popular examples of dsdasighgdshsddc ‘dissing’ include auoagfoylhgo (‘Eat my tail s
cum!’) and oiaiuhagiuggghafug (‘Your mum was a Griffon Bruxellois!’). Of course, with the rise of the Internet, dsdasighgdshsddc has evolved, mutated and, some would claim, been irrevocably dumbed down. For example, jhjdhjdhdddddddvvvd (‘Oh my god! How much do I want my owner to get off this computer and let me pad his stomach!’) is now lazily abbreviated by many Generation Y cats to a simpler, less poetic jhdvvvvd.
Grudgin
A half-hearted version of the Nuggin, the act of pushing one’s wet nose into one’s human’s hand or knuckle (see Under the Paw, Simon & Schuster, 2008), The Grudgin more often than not marks a bargain between cat and owner: ‘I am feeling too bored/self-important/generally unarsed to push the side of my nose into your hand, but will do so, half-heartedly, knowing that this is the price one must pay for leftover, past-its-sell-by-date, wafer-thin turkey.’
Litebeer
The kind of middling, tepid water still bafflingly placed by humans for cats in a combination of receptacles all over the globe, in spite of empirical evidence suggesting that the favourite tipple of most felines is either a) water straight from the tap, or b) stagnant pond soup, seasoned with the death juice of as many tiny creatures as possible. It is felt by many cats that the continuing marketing of Litebeer encapsulates humans’ overall failure to understand a fundamental fact of feline nature: that cats are animals of extremes, unwilling to accept the middle-ground and eternally fearful of the mediocre.
Satan’s Coal
The one dried, blackened gribbly bit of food at the bottom of the food bowl that a cat will always leave behind, no matter how hungry it seems to be before (or after) feeding time. The legend of Satan’s Coal, which hasn’t got anything to do with coal whatsoever, goes all the way back to the time when Osiris, a farm cat in eighteenth-century Yorkshire, found a nugget of dried shrew corpse on the floor of a neighbour’s barn that had been mysteriously ignored by whichever animal had caught it. So moggy folkore says, Osiris was ‘dared’ to eat the tempting nugget by a local witch’s cat, and subsequently keeled over and died. Even pragmatic, hardheaded cats who view the story of Satan’s Coal as ‘gobbledigook’ often find themselves steering away from that last gribbly bit at feeding time, putting a paw to their stomach and offering such transparent excuses as ‘I’m on the Catkins diet at the moment’ and ‘No, seriously, I’m podged – I found a smoky bacon-flavoured crisp on the floor earlier and, as you know, those things are surprisingly filling’.
