Diary of a Dog-walker Read Free Page B

James while the ‘Bitty’ scene in
Little Britain
was being recorded. Readers unfamiliar with ‘Bitty’ should think carefully before they look for it on YouTube. I was shown it just before a
Today
discussion about breast-feeding, and it is most unsettling. Small wonder a look of existential angst occasionally cloudsBertie’s thoughtful eyes: which of us, after a lifetime of faithful family service and dreams of sheep, could assimilate the sight of a chap manipulating a milk-squirting pump behind the sofa?
    Bertie’s owner – a distinguished lawyer, who therefore has firm views on everything – believes that a dog’s intelligence can be judged by the words it knows. Bertie, he claims, understands all the variations of ‘ride’: whether it is ‘shall we go for a ride?’ or ‘Let’s go riding now’, the dog is off to the tack room. Kudu has a similar learnt response to the Saturday-morning moment when my wife puts her walking jeans on: he becomes so frenzied as denim covers leg that she now delays dressing until the last minute, adding a scandalously exciting dimension of wifely semi-nudity to weekend pleasures.
    We set off, with me on foot and Bertie’s owner on his horse, and were soon in one of those secret stretches of English countryside that fold in on themselves to keep their wildness private. We were less than twenty miles from London – we passed Stratton’s Folly, a tower built by an eighteenth-century merchant so that he could admire his ships on the Thames – but this was still the Hertfordshire that Beatrix Potter loved when she visited her grandmother at Essendon (we could hear its parish bells across the fields).
    Kudu’s most elegant manoeuvre is the ScentguidedHigh-speed Handbrake Turn: when the nose hits something sniffable, it locks on, like a laser to a Tornado, and, whatever his speed, the rest of him swings round it as he decelerates. Watching him work the hedgerows with focused enthusiasm was just the tonic I needed.
    The sniff-centric world-view can make him forget himself, and he has, I fear, been known to lift a leg on a fellow dog-walker’s boots. I once watched impotently as, running ahead, his nose locked on to the shoes of Battersea’s most celebrated walker, Lady Thatcher.
    But there is a fine political instinct in that solid-chocolate head: at the
moment critique
the leg uncocked, and she gave him a gracious smile.
    The day Jim Naughtie and I broke all the rules
    11 July 2009
    A cardinal rule of broadcasting is never to run: if you arrive breathless in the studio it is impossible to recover. Another is that two presenters should never talk together: the listeners hate it. And if you raise your voice – there are exceptions to this – you have probably lost control.
    Dog-walking is different. My
Today
colleagueJames Naughtie and I took to Richmond Park on the hottest afternoon of the heatwave. The park is the capital’s giant lung (far and away London’s largest open space), and you breathe more easily within its gates. Even after days of pitiless sun those majestic aspects – with their oaks and deer – looked temptingly lush.
    The Spaniels took off. Jim’s Tess – a ten-year-old Cocker of usually dignified demeanour – spotted a picnic, and the snout was among the sandwiches. My Kudu sprinted to an oak to defecate – a yard from an elderly lady enjoying her book in the shade. The crimes, satisfyingly symmetrical in a curious way, were simultaneous, and Jim and I broke all those broadcasting rules at once as we restored decorum.
    Jim made his confession: in South Africa recently he ate a steak from the Kudu antelope. Mrs Naughtie, he reported, had shown greater scruple, and declined the dish out of respect for the Dog. I salute her sensitivity.
    To the dogs, Richmond offered smells of real country. To me this royal park smells of power; the ghosts of Tudors and