Diary of a Dog-walker Read Free

puppy that no one we met could resist smiling at him and talking to me. And very relaxing it was to chat to people with a common interest that had nothing whatever to do with the matters that generally preoccupied me during working hours.
    By the time I began writing my dog columns my professional life had changed dramatically, but when I re-read these first pieces I am reminded of the carefree spirit of those early dog-walking days.
    Commodore Coco Fluffy Paws is no name for a dog
    13 June 2009
    The Dog’s best Battersea friend is called Achilles. The name was inspired by a young boy’s affectionate and rather good joke against his mother: endless fun, he thought, could be had from hearing her call, ‘Achilles … heel!’
    Being a Spaniel, Achilles doesn’t really do heel. He can, however, lay claim (I suspect) to being the only dog in SW1 to have a Homeric Epithet. In
The Iliad
, the description ‘fleet-footed’ is almost always attached to the name of Achilles, and as the glorious streak of sprinting gold that bears the mythical warrior’s name disappears in pursuit of some deliciously dead piece of London wildlife, the phrase suits him all too well.
    Finding a name that fits your dog is hazardous – the madness that brought it into your life can tempt you into exuberance. Our neighbours have just negotiated the siren temptations of ‘Duke Pompom of Stockwell’, ‘Commodore Coco Fluffy Paws’, and Tinchy (after Tinchy Strider, a rapper, since you ask), but settled on the perfectly sensible and appropriate ‘Teddy’ for their Poodle.
    Our own Dog was named in honour of his ancestral heritage: his mother’s owners have a SouthAfrican background, and their animals are named in Zulu and Afrikaans. Our search for something suitable turned up one name I rather regret: Iska means ‘the wind’ in the West African language Hausa. It is melodious, but that final
a
gives it a feminine feel, and the Dog is very blokeish – so I offer it to any reader seeking a name for a fleet-footed bitch.
    We chose Kudu for our Springer Spaniel because the beast that bears that name is large and springs – and, with Dog-Vanity-by-Proxy (or DVP, a surprisingly common psychological condition), because the nineteenth-century hunter Frederick Selous described the kudu as ‘perhaps the handsomest antelope in the world’. Further research reveals that male kudus are known for the way they ‘avoid violent situations and prefer to side-step danger rather than create it’.
    The Dog shows remarkable emotional intelligence in this regard. There is some rough trade about on Clapham Common, and his method of dealing with aggression is straight out of the manual we BBC types learn when we are sent on courses about operating in Hostile Environments.
    If you are kidnapped, we are told, try not to draw attention to yourself, but at the same time be friendly, and on no account be so grovelling and submissive that the kidnappers feel they can treat you as less than human: that makes you the mostlikely candidate in a kidnap group to be killed.
    Kudu’s response to one of those growling broad-shouldered types that sometimes swagger up with evil intent on the common is to stand very still with a wagging tail. Everything offers friendship, but there is something of substance about the way he holds himself. He never barks – but very, very occasionally, and only if the back-end sniffing turns nasty, he can do a decent throat-gurgle.
    He has formed a pact with the household cats. They sometimes ask for food and then quite deliberately leave the bowl for him – he rewards them (sorry about this) with a bottom-lick. (‘Just like the office, really,’ remarked one of my friends.)
    The shrubberies of Battersea Park have, during the damp dog-walking days of the crisis created by the unfolding revelations about MPs’ expenses, been haunted by MPs’