Diary of a Dog-walker (6 page)

For the most part, however, I have found the sense of a very direct relationship with readers a rewarding one. Most of the feedback reached me through the paper's website, where readers are encouraged to express their views. The blogosphere is a wild and violent place: people seem to feel released from the sort of conventions that would inhibit them if they were writing for the printed page (I was once described as ‘a symptom of the moral degeneracy of modern Britain' in the blog of a writer who would certainly never have said such a thing in her national newspaper column). But dog-owners are, by and large, gentle folk, and there has been remarkably little abuse.

Some people simply have odd or eccentric dog jokes they want to share with a wider audience. Thus this: ‘My uncle had a dog named Bob. This was so spooky since everyone knows that normally Bob's your uncle! In fact my uncle was named Arthur.'

And there has been a fairly steady flow of good dog stories, some of which I incorporated into columns, some of which I just chuckled over, or shared with my family. The column became a conversation.

Know thy President by his choice of pooch

17 October 2009

It is a journalistic commonplace that ‘dog bites man' is not a story, but ‘man bites dog' absolutely is. But try this: dog bites ex-president as punishment for moving him out of a palace with one of the most desirable gardens in the world.

The facts are these. Jacques Chirac's miniature Maltese Terrier, Sumo, had to be treated for mental health problems after leaving the Élysée and its glorious stretch of lawn. The Chiracs now live in a huge flat, courtesy of the late Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri (imagine what this newspaper would make of a similar arrangement for one of our ex-prime ministers), but this is apparently not grand
enough for Sumo. He began ‘routinely' assaulting his master, and recently savaged Monsieur Chirac's stomach, causing great distress to Madame Chirac: ‘I was extremely frightened by all the blood,' she said. ‘It's awful, those little teeth!' Sumo has been sent to the country in disgrace.

For a dog columnist with an interest in international politics and a spell as Paris correspondent on the CV, this is as close as it gets to the perfect news story. Politics, the French culture of public life and the impenetrable oddness of the French doggy mind, all these things suggest themselves for comment. What riches for rumination during the walks on this week's glorious autumn days! And I think that Kudu and I have reached a similar conclusion – although we approach the matter from different angles.

My instinct is that to mine a moral from the story we should begin with the politics. And here is a spooky thing: George W. Bush's Scottish Terrier Barney became a biter during his last days at the White House too. Could it be that unsuccessful presidents make bad dog-owners?

All dog-owners know that their hounds can pick up their moods, and Barney's victims were members of the press corps. A Reuters correspondent tried to give him a pat a few days after the Republican defeat in the presidential election, and Barney gave him a nasty nip in the finger. Is it too fanciful to suggest
that he was fulfilling his master's private fantasies?

Kudu looks at the dog first and the master second, and I have a shrewd idea that the Sumo and Barney stories would confirm one of his prejudices: I realize this is by far and away the most controversial statement this column has ever ventured, but I am beginning to suspect he disapproves of small dogs.

We passed a woman on Clapham Common carrying a diminutive pooch like a baby in a papoose. Kudu did not growl – he has extremely good manners – but he fired a look of bemused disdain at the thing. What, after all, is the point of a walk if you cannot run constantly in circles on the important business of picking up smells, pausing only to roll in fox poo from time to time?

Kudu may be on to something here: is a very small dog appropriate for a man in power? Vladimir Putin apparently thought not, and once told George Bush that a Scottish Terrier was beneath the dignity of a world leader, boasting that his own Labrador was ‘bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, meaner' than the American First Dog. This took place before Barney's savaging of the White House press corps, of course, and you can see where Mr Putin is coming from. But what sort of a politician thinks being mean is something to take pride in?

Whether you look at the dog first or the man first, the principle is the same: you will know one if
you know the other. And while party politics is not the business of the column, that is not a bad way to judge a leader.

Oh, and I have a sense of where David Cameron stands on the dog thing, because of something he let slip in the studio. But I am keeping schtum.

Cameron told me – I think during Thought for the Day – that he had once owned a Springer. At the time I worried that revealing this fact might have listeners pricking up their ears for any hint of a Tory bias in my broadcasting. He also warned me that they get smelly when they are old; we have not got there yet, but I suspect he is probably right.

Join a US Howl-oween Parade? No thanks
…

31 October 2009

Restless on the Amtrak from Washington to New York, I made my way to the dining car. We were skimming the open reaches of water along the Delaware coast and, as I admired the handsome houses with their lawns down to moorings on the sound, I fell in with a couple of Wall Street types heading home.

The collars were open, the silk ties at half-mast, the tailored suits a little rumpled, and they were lining up the beers. We talked escrow, liquidity and
leverage. I shook my head sympathetically about the search for a zero-plus position, wondered how long the numbers would stack and went over the wall with them on a couple of deals. It was like being in a Spielberg movie – as America so often is: one of these guys, I thought, will get home and find an alien in the tool shed.

The man in Institutional Risk Analysis – ho-ho, I hear you say – suddenly turned sentimental: ‘Can't wait to get back to Westchester,' he said, ‘and have a good romp with my Westie in the yard!' He and his fellow Master of the Universe then talked dogs all the way through New Jersey with as much enthusiasm as they had shown for high finance.

Travelling the United States with a dog columnist's eye for the first time, I was struck by the way its dog cultures vary. Washington is an easy-going place with a southern culture of politesse: its dogs conform perfectly to its ethos, appearing for a leisurely amble along its wide, tree-lined streets twice daily, never pulling on their leads (unlike a certain person I could mention) and greeting one another with polite reserve. Most of the dogs I encountered in New York, by contrast, were like my hotel room there: tiny and ludicrously ‘designer'. And in the über-hip Californian workspace of the Google-plex (where, in a perfect Californian moment, I witnessed one of the Internet giant's legendary founders roller-blading
through Reception carrying his lunch) they have an open dog policy – the hounds mingle happily with the geeks ‘writing code'.

America knocks our claim to be a dog-loving country into the proverbial cocked hat.

In the United States, if you want a partner who shares your doggy enthusiasms, there is a special singles agency (
www.datemypet.com
, if you are interested). If it is dog news you are after, the
New York Post
has a weekly page – with features on such matters as Canine Acupuncture.
Modern Dog
magazine can tell you where to find the Top Ten Dog Blogs. And if you are facing doggy bereavement, how about a ‘memorial pillow', which allows you to ‘conceal the ashes in a discreet interior pouch so you can hold them close'?

The bookshops in Washington and New York are stuffed with titles like
Come Back Como; winning the heart of a reluctant dog
. Redemption by doggy affection is usually the theme: the blurb for
A Big Little Life – Memoir of a Joyful Dog
tells how Trixie ‘taught Dean [Koontz, the writer] to trust his instincts, persuaded him to cut down to a fifty-hour work week, and, perhaps most important, renewed in him a sense of wonder …'

It would be dangerous for this column to sneer – I have done my fair share of anthropomorphizing on my Kudu adventures. But sentimentality slips very easily into cruelty. This season in the United States is
marked by what are known as Howl-oween Parades, for which dogs are given absurd and demeaning costumes. Would I dress Kudu in a pink tutu? Or put him in a French maid's outfit? I would not, and I worry about the dog ethics of those who would.

And it is very nice to be home. Kudu and I do not really do ‘romps in the yard', but we do enjoy sniffing around the garden together, working out what needs attention with the secateurs.

Every dog should have his day at the workplace

14 November 2009

Kudu and I offer belated congratulations to Molly, a Welsh Springer Spaniel of our acquaintance, who has been named Westminster Dog of the Year. Her owner, the shadow international development secretary Andrew Mitchell, was said to be ‘overwhelmed', and declared that he and Molly were ‘collecting the award on behalf of all dogs in Sutton Coldfield' (his constituency). In this newspaper's photograph of the event, Molly herself, gloriously confident in her beauty, looked as if she would have little truck with such shameless political opportunism.

Young beauties can be powerful role models, and in her private life Molly provides a socially valuable
example: she is a working dog. I do not mean she picks up pheasants or herds sheep; far less am I using the phrase in the sense of ‘working girl' (I happen to know that her chastity is a closely guarded treasure, because I have enquired on Kudu's behalf). Molly is taken to work by her mistress.

I reported in my last column that the Internet giant Google includes an open dog policy in the trendy working practices (volleyball at lunchtime, slogans like ‘You don't have to wear a suit to be serious' and so on) it deploys to encourage creativity. The time has come for this column to take a Public Position: dogs in the workplace should be encouraged as widely as possible.

Some businesses can be given exemptions: you would not want Kudu's wag in a glass factory, and I can see the need for the ‘Sorry, no dogs – not even cute ones' sign, which has recently appeared in our local butcher (they make up for it by being very generous with bones). But the general presumption should be that dogs are allowed to come to work with their owners.

Employers would quickly appreciate the impact on staff relations. It is impossible to have an argument in the presence of a dog – certainly a nicely brought-up one. If anyone in our household speaks with a raised voice, Kudu adopts an expression of distress, and politely intervenes.

Dogs aid concentration: if I have something difficult to write I retreat to my shed, and with Kudu at my feet, the words come easily. Dogs have sharp instincts for health and safety: if I work for too long at a stretch I find a large head nuzzling my knees, demanding a screen break.

Above all, dogs can puncture the pomposity that is such a common feature of corporate life. There is a famous passage about this in Pepys's account of the return of Charles II to England in 1660. The king arrived at Dover in great splendour aboard the
Royal Charles
, and Pepys was in the flotilla of small boats that accompanied him: ‘I went, and Mr Mansell, and one of the King's footmen,' he recorded, ‘with a dog that the king loved (which shit in the boat, which made us laugh, and me think that a king and all that belong to him are but just as others are).' Obviously one would hope to avoid the shitting, but the cheerfully egalitarian manner with which dogs treat humans would remind the grandest CEO that he is ‘just as others are'.

By way of a postscript to the launch of this important campaign, here is a charming story a reader has offered in response to my column on a canine ‘sixth sense'. He described looking after an elderly and unwell father who was subject to what he termed ‘fits' towards the end of his life, and he wrote that his West Highland Terrier, Sophie, always
warned him in advance that a fitting episode was about to take place. She would approach the bedside and bark in a particular way, enabling my correspondent to offer comfort when it was needed.

Imagine what a dog like that could do in the board room.

My stint as ITN's diplomatic editor in the early 1990s coincided with a period of especially intense international summitry. The Soviet empire was collapsing, Germany was being reunited, the Balkans were in flames, and the European Union (or the European Community, as it then was) was convulsed by negotiations over what would become the euro. All of these things required seemingly endless meetings of Very Important Persons, and it was my job to cover them. I spent a punishing amount of time getting on planes and living in hotel rooms.

Most of these meetings took place in glamorous surroundings – a palace in Rome, a château in the French countryside or, famously, the picturesque old Dutch town of Maastricht – but the way they were run made it quite impossible to appreciate or enjoy the places. The host government would find some suitably utilitarian space – very often an underground car park – where they could erect a ‘media village' of temporary offices and broadcasting facilities, and these artificial worlds became our homes; we could attend press conferences, eat our meals and put together our stories without ever coming up for air. I used to arrive early in the
morning and leave late (
News at Ten
was my main duty), and it was perfectly possible to spend a couple of days in Paris, Moscow or Washington without seeing anything at all of those great cities. It became a blur: they were years of going everywhere but visiting nowhere – and any reader who travels for business will recognize the experience.

I have vowed never to travel like that again – in fact, I have become primly moralistic on the subject. If you find yourself somewhere exotic at someone else's expense, having stomped down a great big carbon footprint to get there, I think you have a duty to explore the place a bit. No matter how exhausted I am at the end of a news-reporting trip, I always force myself to look around.