The KILLING of GARCIA TALKER

“We will have him round every night. We will serve fried chicken”. These dozen words have rocked the febrile world of golf to its proverbial foundations. Can you credit it?

Here’s how they came to be said. Every year, the European Tour (the organisation that manages those events in Europe at which the professionals play) hosts a dinner for players and officials. That this year’s dinner was held at Heathrow suggests that it is not the most elegant event in the social calendar.

Evidently there are speeches and rather less formal shenanigans at these dinners. For aught I know, they have fire-eating and pole-dancers. At any rate, the golfer Sergio Garcia had the mic this year and someone asked whether he would invite Tiger Woods over for a meal during the forthcoming US Open. The subtext to this question was not wholly without mischief because it is no secret that Garcia and Woods are not exactly bosom buddies.


A contrite Señor Garcia

Garcia’s off-the-cuff answer brought a hushed horror to the crowd. People rose from their half-eaten sorbets and left the room in search of smelling salts and brandy. For the next 24 hours, all flights due to land at Heathrow were diverted to Stansted. Tiger Woods is secluded at an exclusive retreat in Beverly Hills where profound shocks are given state-of-the-art treatment. Garcia has been banned from all professional and amateur golf courses for the rest of his life and has been obliged to take up crown-green bowls. The Queen has been informed.

Here’s what my statement would be if I were Garcia. “I love fried chicken. I cook it every week and everyone says mine is the best. Whenever I have a particularly favoured guest, I serve fried chicken. I am told that fried chicken is eaten by black people in the United States. I can tell you that it is also eaten by white people in the States. It is eaten by Europeans in Europe, by Asian people in Asia and by Africans and South Americans in, respectively, Africa and South America. It is nowhere an unusual dish, save perhaps in the Arctic and the Antarctic, where chickens are more difficult to keep.


Fried chicken: this is a Thai version

“At the dinner, I did not mention the fact that Tiger Woods is of mixed race. Indeed, the matter of race never entered the discussion until I was accused of racism. I deny racism. I will not apologise because I have no reason to apologise. If what I said in any way implied that Tiger Woods is of mixed race, so what? This is not a secret about him. It is not racist to say that someone is black or of mixed race. There is never any mention in the British media of Stephen Lawrence wherein he is not described as “the murdered black teenager”. Is that racist?

“Is it racist to suggest that the French drink champagne or that the Jews eat chopped liver? I am a Spaniard. Is it racist every time someone describes me as a Spanish golfer? Would it be thought racist if someone asked whether I would like paella on the European Tour dinner menu? And would it be racist even if I merely laughed and said ‘that’s fine’? I only ask because Tiger Woods has said “it’s long past time to move on and talk about golf”. I agree.


Tiger and Sergio nearly come to blows

“So who are these people who take it upon themselves to be offended on Woods’ behalf? Is any of them black or of mixed race? The management of the European Tour is hardly celebrated across the world as a model of interracial, non-sexist integration. Nor is any other part of the professional golf world. Should we not look at the fact that, after more than a decade and a half at the top of the game, Tiger Woods is still virtually the only top-100 player who is not white? Isn’t that a rather more pertinent question than arguing about whether an informal, unplanned remark gave offence to people whose own circumstances were in no way touched by it?

“If the authorities decide to take any punitive action against me, I shall take legal action against them. I shall also consult my lawyers if any sponsors try to vary my contracts with them. This is a non-issue blown up by the media and by self-important individuals anxious to jump on any bandwagon that permits them to air their own constantly-nurtured sense of outrage. It’s time people grew up”.

*************************************

My regular readers will have noted that the flow has slowed this year. This is largely because I am engaged in writing a book and also – and, as you may imagine, this is apt to interfere with the book-writing too – a new dog has joined our pack, a seven year-old rescue chocolate Labrador, name of Bear.


Bear

MORE THAN JUST a PET

Fargo our Great Dane died yesterday at the age of eleven years and exactly two months, a remarkable span for a giant breed. His likeness has been and will remain my on-line avatar. But the gap he leaves in our lives can never be filled. He was our first pet – we dutifully waited many years until we had the space and the routines to allow a dog to live with us happily.

I suspect that the vast majority of pet dogs (much more so than relatively self-sufficient cats) pass lives of unrelieved misery – bored, neglected and lonely. The central fact to understand about dogs is that they are pack animals. As soon as they join a household, they accept that they are in a pack, even if the pack consists of no more than a lap dog and an elderly housebound human. But dogs need to be in packs and so, if they are abandoned for hours on end by the rest of the pack, they become distressed, anxious, fearful, neurotic, destructive. How many dogs are made yet more miserable by being punished for expressing that misery?

Photograph: Barbra Flinder

Well, we gave Fargo a very happy life and he repaid us in full. We both work from home so were always around and, when he was two, we introduced a second dog into the pack, one too small to make any but a token challenge to Fargo’s status. The pair rubbed along pretty well and it meant that we could go out – though never for longer than three hours – and know they were company for each other.

Fargo was born in Wootton Bassett in the week of the 9/11 attacks. His kennels had military connections: the kennel name of his sire was Toscade Desert Storm, but happily his own name was the more benign Toscade Tigerfeet. Between first meeting him and then bringing him home, we decided to name him after a movie over which we both enthused. When we collected him, the breeder’s mother was there and she asked what we would call the dog. We told her. “Oh yes?” she asked. “Is that like Welsh Fargo?”

Though the runt of a litter of eleven, he grew into a ten-stone dog whose head loomed above mine when I (just below six feet) stood upright and he had his front paws on my shoulders. If I had £10 from everyone who jovially compared him with a horse, I should be very comfortably off.

When one keeps pets, one can easily become sentimental about them. My partner David and I dearly loved our two dogs, though not in anything like the way or to the degree that we love each other. I doubt that the dogs have loved us in any way or to any degree at all. That they are living on velvet they take for granted while having no sense of an alternative life.

They do not bite the hands that feed. They respond to physical contact but it is idle to imagine that licking or nuzzling is an earnest of anything so human as affection. In our moments when the mystic threatens to intrude, we like to pretend that there is something more profound than routine pet-keeping in the bonding between us and them. But the temptation to characterize a Great Dane as soulful, wise and a bit spiritual is strong. It’s also nonsense, of course. He was just an animal. But an unusually even-tempered one.

Photograph: Barbra Flinder

Dogs are perfectly capable of learning things, even relatively complex and sophisticated things. Fargo knew that the appearance of any kind of luggage meant that the pack was about to be deprived of a human member and he got depressed by this. I have watched him go up to a small travelling case, sniff it and then sit back on his haunches and emit a resounding sigh. One spring, we were leaving in a flurry of delay and panic to rush to Heathrow for a flight at some appalling hour on a Sunday morning and foolishly allowed Fargo to see the bags coming downstairs. He promptly threw back his head and howled. It pierced the heart of course. And it was impossible to inform him that the house-sitters (whom he adored) would be there by day-light.

Fed all his life on the BARF diet (bones and raw food – always uncooked bones, of course), Fargo maintained fitness and relative energy into old age, never remotely likely to suffer dysplasia and other joint and bone conditions common in big dogs. In his last months, though, arthritis set in and his legs began to fail him until he could barely stand. At this point, he made clear his desire for release by refusing food. What a boon it is that we are able to give our pets what they want and, thanks to the sensitive vet whom Fargo trusted from puppyhood, to do it so simply and with so little anxiety.

All his long life, it was his gentle and friendly disposition that endeared Fargo to everyone. When we first took him to obedience classes, a group of the women owners referred to him darkly as “the beast”. But they soon learned otherwise so that, when there were exercises that required us to swap dogs, there was always a clamour for Fargo’s leash.

He could tap into his lupine origins, however. On holiday in Cornwall, I was walking him off the lead through a sloping wood when he suddenly stiffened as he gazed ahead. There was a cow grazing on the track. It looked up, saw Fargo and, discretion being the better part of valour, carefully turned and started to head down through the trees. Fargo wasn’t having that. Of course, his running towards it made the cow run. And I already knew that I had no control over events. There were other cows further off. The cow that Fargo was pursuing turned and ran back. When it regained the track, it turned and galloped towards me. Fargo was now snapping at its heels, then going for its throat, tumbling under its hooves and, undaunted, pressing on.

I grabbed at Fargo’s collar as the pair thundered past but couldn’t hold him. The cow swerved uphill and then I saw that there were several more ahead, charging up through the trees. I gave chase but within moments all the animals were out of sight. The going was rough. I came across trampled barbed wire, then a cleft in the ground, about four feet deep, at the bottom of which was spattered blood. This was a nightmare. At last the trees abruptly ended and there was a huge grass field, breasting a steep hill. No cattle or dogs were in sight.

As I toiled up the hill, I suddenly saw horns rising on the horizon and then a cow, then several, then a large herd came ambling towards me. Soon they surrounded me, sniffing amiably. I asked if they had seen a Great Dane but they gave no answer.

Scanning the wooded area back below me, I spotted Fargo slinking through the trees. I yelled and whistled but he moved out of sight. I tramped back towards where I had seen him, then descended the long wooded slope. By the time I got back to the track, the light was going. I arranged two large branches in a cross shape on the track to indicate where I thought the herd and the dog had left it. Then I headed back to our rented cottage, calling Fargo’s name. As I got close to the cottage, I heard David’s voice: “he’s here”.

David had responded to a whining at the door and found the dog, muddy and covered in cuts and scratches. He had feared that something terrible had befallen me and was just setting out to find me when he heard my call. Fargo was none the worse for wear and no doubt feeling thrilled by his long chase. What he couldn’t know was that any farmer who had spotted him charging his herd would have been fully entitled to shoot him dead.

But most of the time, Fargo was as dignified and sedate as an old colonel relaxing at his club. With the breed’s characteristic habit of leaning gently into the legs of those they accept and his own particular curiosity to discover what everyone might have been eating by examining their mouths at close quarters, Fargo won over every human who met him, not least those hitherto indifferent to or even fearful of big dogs.

That he found the happy knack of looming without seeming in any way threatening may have been the secret of his unexpected charm. Whatever it was, he never failed to disarm. He was truly a poster-boy, both for the breed in particular and for dogdom in general. Our hearts ache.

LIVE and LET LIVE

There was a spider in the bath this morning. Not being Annie Hall, I had no need to summon assistance. I couldn’t initially see it but I knew it was there – on the enamel, I could feel cobwebby stuff and there were what looked like some scraps of mostly-consumed fly.

Our bath has three jacuzzi jets and spiders are apt to hide in those. I did what I always do before having a soak: I splooshed some cold water around the bath and into the jets. This usually flushes out the intruder. I have a clear plastic tub ready and I lower it over the spider. Then I slide an old postcard under the creature, being careful not to damage its legs, so that it is trapped in the tub. I lift the tub clear and deposit the spider outside. We do the same all summer for bees, butterflies, moths and hornets that become trapped in our conservatory and otherwise would soon succumb to dehydration. I’ve even been known to rescue wasps and flies in the same manner.

A house spider, your friend

On this occasion, the spider wouldn’t come out. I tried several times without success, then started to fill the bath with cold water. I figured the rising tide would drive out the spider, but by the time the water level had topped the jets nothing had emerged. I drained the bath again. Raising one of the jets with my finger, I found the spider in a bedraggled heap underneath. I guessed it had got trapped and had drowned. I was crestfallen. Spiders are completely admirable creatures. They perform a function useful to humans. They kill and part-consume flies and other insects that do not benefit us. I have no quarrel with any spider and, if I find one in a situation that endangers it, I will endeavour to catch it alive and convey it to a safer place. If a daddy-longlegs (that is, a harvestman or crane fly) puts in an appearance, I try to save that too but those spindly oddities are becoming rare.

I fished out the corpse on a loofah and dropped it onto the sloping roof below the bathroom window. Immediately it jumped up and scuttled away. My heart leapt. How smart of it to lie doggo and hope that I would not try to kill it. And how tough it must be to survive immersion in water.

Daddy-longlegs

The specimen in question was a common house spider. The species’ most active season is beginning and I had noticed that none had been trapped in the bath so far this year. Now I shall be on the lookout for others. I don’t want any to perish for my convenience.

It’s curious that people are so “afraid” of spiders. Like all such fears, there is no basis for it in rationality. Poisonous spiders are not apt to turn up in England. Arachnids have no designs on humans; indeed, like all creatures on the planet, they have far more reason to fear man than vice versa.

Those who have a thing about spiders and other small creatures crossly counter one’s rational points by retreating to their knowledge that their fear is indeed irrational and therefore cannot be addressed by reason. Fair enough, as long as I am not expected to sanction the gratuitous killing of innocent creatures in order that this irrationality be indulged. The logical extension of their position is that the irrational fear people feel towards those of another race, nationality, creed or sexuality is equally acceptable and should be “understood”. I don’t think so.

My partner’s niece declares gravely that spiders bite. No they don’t, not in Britain anyway. This is an old urban myth, refuted again and again by those who study arachnids and know of what they speak. In any case, our niece adores dogs and no one disputes that they bite and do so rather more significantly than any insect. I suppose it is that spiders scuttle that makes them unsettling. You can’t guess where they will get to next and, relative to their size, they make cheetahs look torpid. I used to be bothered by moths which, I guess, had to do with the combination of their fluttering (the airborne equivalent of scuttling) and their unpredictability. But I got over it.

Moth

There is an essay by Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth, as masterly as it is moving, that catches as I never could the microcosmic resonance of the fall of a tiny creature: “… it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body … It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death” [The Hogarth Press 1942]. That Mrs Woolf’s own fragile grasp upon life was to yield within a year of setting down those words only adds to their poignancy.

From that fine and delicate sensibility, born in Victorian England and nurtured in the hothouse of antebellum Bloomsbury, to the facile celebrity of contemporary telly and Sunday Times column stardom is a sheer precipice. Yet I know without need of a thought that I would rather the rare air than the foothill froth any time. On an edition of Have I Got News For You, the motor-loving broadcaster and wide boy Jeremy Clarkson once boasted that, while lately driving at night, he had deliberately run down a fox.

How can anyone but an insentient thug do a thing like that? And how could he then volunteer it about himself as though it made him a grand fellow? How could he know – would he indeed care? – that it was a clean kill, that the victim of his prank did not suffer a prolonged death agony? And not only did he gratuitously slaughter a beautiful, defenceless animal but, given that she might have been a vixen foraging for her pups, he may also have condemned her litter to slow starvation. A man who can commit such wanton cruelty would be capable of running down a badger. Or a deer. Or a cat. Or a dog. My dog.

I don’t take a Buddhist view of the sanctity of animal life, nor do I subscribe to the Blakean notion that “everything that lives is holy”. But I do think that living creatures should not lose that life merely for my convenience. I am not a vegetarian, so of course animals, birds and fish do perish on a daily basis for my consumption. I think this is a necessary process and – I have argued elsewhere on this blog – a practical one. The creatures that we humans would have eaten next week will not be free to relish long and productive lives if, tomorrow, the eating of flesh is declared unlawful. In such a circumstance, there would simply be a clearing-the-decks cull on an unimaginable scale.

Earwig

I have told this tale before but it pertains. Some years ago I came across an earwig in the house. I had a formative experience of these rather alarming-looking little blighters when, playing in a friend’s garden, I stuck the end of a bamboo cane in my mouth and then found myself spitting out a nest of earwigs. Not nice. In the grown-up experience, it was winter and we had a log fire going. I gathered the intruder onto a sheet of paper and dropped it onto the fire, expecting it to be instantly consumed. Instead, it bounced on a log and secured a foothold, then ran about seeking means of escape. There was none. Nor could I help it, surrounded as it was by flames. Now I felt bad. As I watched, it clearly became increasingly desperate and then hopelessly pressed itself into a crevice in the wood where no doubt it soon braised to death. I know that, while my memory lasts, I shall not forget that earwig whose drawn-out death I needlessly caused.

I accept that, in the objective order of things, an earwig is nowhere near as “important” as a human. And yet I cannot say that its life is any less dear to it than mine is to me. Indeed, wild creatures perform a daily drama of staying alive, menaced by predators or threatened with starvation. They must have a more vivid sense of danger than we humans ever have, unless we live in a war zone.

Why are we fearful of and cruel to insects? It is true that the creature that has killed more humans than any other is not the snake, crocodile, rhinoceros, bear, tiger or water buffalo but a tiny insect, the mosquito. I have no compunction whatever about squishing mosquitoes whenever I encounter one – and, as we used to have an ancient pond quite near the house, I did so rather often on summer nights. I argue that skeeters are a special case – them and ticks.

Some years ago, in Kerala in southern India, I was just closing my book before bedding down in a hotel room when I spotted an unfamiliar insect on the wall six or eight feet from me behind a piece of furniture. It was a rather noticeable insect, highly coloured and on the large side – somewhere between the size of a dinner plate and a small family car. I regarded this beast quite evenly. I thought of my options: 1) run screaming from the room; 2) hit it with a chair; 3) smother it in an item of clothing and bundle it out of the door; 4) switch off the bedside light and go to sleep. It wasn’t very difficult to decide on option 4 and I drifted off in seconds. In the morning, the insect had gone without taking any of my limbs with it. I couldn’t guess how such a huge insect could have escaped the room. Had I swallowed it in the night? I think I would know if I had. Perhaps it was clinging to the underside of the bed. I didn’t bother to look.

Generally, I pursue a policy of live and let live with any living thing. Under the jetty that juts out over our ancient pond site, rats sometimes take up residence, unperturbed by the scent of dogs. Our little dog, before he lost his sight, loved to chase them. But there has been no sign of any rats for a year or two so they have perhaps moved on. I rather miss them. And I was never in the slightest alarmed by their proximity. The conventional wisdom has it that there is a rat within fifty feet of everyone on the planet (much closer in London). We are sometimes warned about the danger of diseases carried by rats but did you ever hear of anyone being made ill by the proximity of a rat? I think people who drive too fast are a much greater danger.

And that, finally, is the important point about creatures. None is remotely such a danger to us, to their fellow creatures or to the very survival of life on earth as humanity. It is man who is the creepy-crawly, the bug, the vermin, the pest, the spider in the bath.

Note: this is a refreshment of a piece (or, as my chum Simon prefers, a monograph) posted some three years ago.

CREATURES’ COMFORT

There was a spider in the bath this morning. I am no Annie Hall, so I did not summon assistance. It’s curious that people are so “afraid” of spiders. Like all such fears, there is no basis for it in rationality. Poisonous spiders are not apt to turn up in England. Arachnids have no designs on humans; indeed, like all creatures on the planet, they have far more reason to fear man than vice versa. I suppose it is that spiders scuttle that makes them unsettling. You can’t guess where they will get to next and, relative to their size, they make cheetahs look torpid. I used to be bothered by moths which, I guess, had to do with the combination of their fluttering (the airborne equivalent of scuttling) and their unpredictability. But I got over it.

Before I run the bath, I wipe it round with an old sponge topped with a splodge of Cif. Cif used to be called Jif, a much more apposite name. Now I can only think of cleaning the bath as The Revenge of the Cif. After I have splooshed water around, I also slosh some into the jacuzzi jets. I’m not swanking, just describing what sort of bath we inherited when we bought the house. Spiders that have found themselves marooned in the bath sometimes hide in the jets. I only found this out one morning soon after we moved in when I was enjoying a soak and a very large and very dead spider floated past my head.

Today’s spider was also a casualty. Despite The Revenge of the Cif, I was just lowering my foot into the water when a house spider, much the same size as its late predecessor, appeared on the water’s surface. I was dismayed. I fished it out on a sponge and lowered it onto the sloping roof below the bathroom window but there seemed no hope that it was alive. However, when I looked again after the bath there was no sign of the bedraggled creature. Had it recovered and staggered away or had a passing bird snapped it up? I shall never know.

I don’t take a Buddhist view of the sanctity of animal life, nor subscribe to the Blakean notion that “everything that lives is holy”. But I do not think that living creatures should lose that life merely for my convenience. I am not a vegetarian so of course animals, birds and fish do perish on a daily basis for my consumption. I think this is a necessary process and – I have argued elsewhere in this blog – a practical one. All the creatures that we humans would have eaten next week will not be free to relish long and productive lives if, tomorrow, the eating of flesh is declared unlawful.

Spiders, though, perform a function useful to humans. They kill and part-consume flies and other insects that do not benefit us. I have no quarrel with any spider and, if I find one in a situation that endangers it, I will endeavour to catch it alive and convey it to a safer place. We do the same all summer for bees, butterflies, moths and hornets that become trapped in our conservatory and soon succumb to dehydration. If a daddy-longlegs (that is, a harvestman or crane fly) put in an appearance, I would save that too but these benign, spindly oddities are becoming rare. I am not in the slightest aggravated by wasps, knowing full well that to demonstrate aggravation to a wasp is likely in turn to aggravate it. Those people who get stung are usually those who wave their arms about ineffectually when a wasp is present.

The other day, I found a wasp struggling in the kitchen sink. Its wings, having got wet, seemed to prevent it from righting itself. For fully ten minutes, I attempted to prize it onto a kitchen cloth but every time it seemed within a whisker of safety, it wriggled away. In the end, I gave it up and washed it down the plughole. Instantly I regretted it. What right did I have to seal its fate, even though, at this time of year, wasps are anyway doomed and dopey? I know that, in the objective order of things, a wasp is nowhere near as “important” as a human. And yet I cannot say that its life is any less dear to it than mine is to me. Indeed, wild creatures perform a daily drama of staying alive, surrounded as they are by predators or threatened with starvation. They must have a more vivid sense of danger than we humans ever have, unless we live in a war zone.

I have told this tale before but some years ago I came across an earwig in the house. I had a formative experience of these rather alarming-looking little blighters when, playing in a friend’s garden, I stuck the end of a bamboo cane in my mouth and then found myself spitting out a nest of earwigs. Not nice. In the grown-up experience, it was winter and so we had a log fire going. I gathered the intruder onto a sheet of paper and dropped it onto the fire, expecting it to be instantly consumed. Instead, it bounced on a log and secured a foothold, then ran about seeking means of escape. There was none. Nor could I help it. Now I felt bad. As I watched, it clearly became increasingly desperate and then hopelessly pressed itself into a crevice in the wood where no doubt it soon braised to death. I know that, while my memory lasts, I shall not forget that earwig whose drawn-out death I needlessly caused.

Why are we fearful of and cruel to insects? It is true that the creature that has killed more humans than any other is not the snake, crocodile, rhinoceros, lion, tiger or water buffalo but a tiny insect, the mosquito. I have no compunction whatever about squishing mosquitoes whenever I encounter one – and, as we have an ancient pond quite near the house, I do so rather often on summer nights.

Some years ago, in Kerala in southern India, I was just closing my book before bedding down in a circular hotel room when I spotted an unfamiliar insect on the wall six or eight feet from me behind a piece of furniture. It was a rather noticeable insect, highly coloured and on the large side – somewhere between the size of a dinner plate and a small family car. I regarded this beast quite evenly. I thought of my options: 1) run screaming from the room; 2) hit it with a chair; 3) smother it in an item of clothing and bundle it out of the door; 4) switch off the bedside light and go to sleep. It wasn’t very difficult to decide on option 4 and I drifted off in seconds. In the morning, the insect had gone without taking any of my limbs with it. I couldn’t guess how such a huge insect could have escaped the room. Had I swallowed it in the night? I think I would know if I had. Probably it was clinging to the underside of the bed. I didn’t bother to look.

Generally, I pursue a policy of live and let live with any living thing. Under the jetty that juts out over our ancient pond, a rat took up residence last summer, unperturbed by the scent of dogs. Our little dog, before he lost his sight, loved to chase him. But there has been no sign of him this year so he has perhaps moved on. I rather miss him. And I am not in the slightest alarmed by his recent proximity. The conventional wisdom has it that there is a rat within fifty feet of everyone on the planet (much closer in London). We are routinely warned about the danger of diseases carried by rats but did you ever hear of anyone being made ill by the proximity of a rat? I think people who drive too fast are a much greater danger.

But that, finally, is the important point about creatures. None is remotely such a danger to us, to their fellow creatures or to the very survival of life on earth as humanity. It is man who is the creepy-crawly, the bug, the vermin, the pest.

The WORLD is YOUR LOBSTER, MY SON

“Going somewhere nice this year?” barbers and other occasional acquaintances are apt to ask as summer gets into its stride.

I mean to return to “going somewhere” but for a moment permit me to dilate upon occasional conversations. Many quite like, even relish such time-passing. Not me. Being obliged to discuss immigration with a cab driver is, as far as I am concerned, the seventh circle of hell. Trapped in the barber’s chair, I find myself hoping that a light snooze will quickly overtake me or that I can dissemble one so that the transaction may be completed to the sound merely of clacking scissors and whirring clippers.

At my local barbers, there are two women who do a tolerable job with my hair and whom I have, over the years, sufficiently trained to meet my social needs. One is happy to be quiet. The first few times, she essayed: “Got the day off work?” How far do I need to feel required to voyage into an account of my working situation before she wishes she hadn’t asked? Do I really care whether she knows what my arrangements are? The other crimper is livelier but she is perfectly happy to swap anecdotes about dogs (or rather my dog tales for her grandchildren vignettes), even though most of both contributions are somewhat dog-eared. At least she does me the kindness of remembering that one of our dogs is a Great Dane.

There are two chaps there who cut hair too (including the new proprietor – needless to say a lot newer than either of the women because no barber is going to hand on his business to a woman) and I wouldn’t object to either of them looking after me, save that their only conversational topic is the one that bores me almost as much as reality television: football.

Going somewhere nice this year? Well, no we’re not. And thanks so much for asking because it reminds me that we haven’t actually “been away” since spring 2006 when we did a swing around the moors, the peaks, the dales and the lakes (not necessarily in that order) as a sort of honeymoon after our civil partnership ceremony. And it’s four-and-a-quarter years since we were abroad anywhere.

Are we extremely atypical? We are both at home all day most days. I have occasional forays to London, Oxford, Bath, Cheltenham, Bristol. David’s outings are even fewer and almost never more than a single over-night. I keep urging him to take off in the car for a week or ten days and he blows hot and cold about the idea but doesn’t take the plunge. I ponder setting off on a succession of buses (with my free pass) in the autumn and seeing where I get to. But we never talk of having a real holiday.

The first problem is the fact that we have the dogs. I always say that dogs are a much larger responsibility than children. When there was just the Dane, we took him two or three times to Landmark Trust properties and, although he found it a bit perplexing, he liked new scents and walks and soon settled. As he’s got older, he cleaves to the familiarity of home and is fussed by going further than our field. Twenty minutes away from base and he’s more than ready to retreat. We never took both of them to stay in a strange property though we have left them both with trusted house sitters. But now that the younger one is a special needs dog, taking them anywhere new is fraught with difficulty and imposing Tati’s medication and supervision regime on anyone else seems a lot to ask. Then of course house sitters add substantially to the cost of the holiday.

That’s the other thing. Like most people, we’ve been pulling in our horns lately. Provisions and utilities and … um … books and CDs are necessities. Jetting or even driving somewhere unfamiliar with no guarantee that you’ll have a good time seems a less sensible way to spend dwindling capital. On the other hand, we have numbers of friends in much more parlous financial straits than us who determinedly continue to take three or four foreign trips a year. I’m a little bemused by this but then none of them has such a comfortable and restorative place to spend every day as we do.

Am I rationalising in some way? My grandparents’ generation thought going to London was about as exotic an experience as the world had to offer. (Having said that, though, I remember the extraordinary adventure of my maternal grandmother, Fanny Allsop from Belper in Derbyshire, who, before she was married, got a job as personal assistant to Mrs John Jacob Astor when that lady was divorcing her legendary husband. Fanny accompanied Mrs Astor across the Atlantic on the Olympic just a hundred years ago and lived with her in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Mr Astor later perished on the Olympic’s sister ship, the Titanic). None of my other three grandparents, I think, ever strayed beyond these shores.

To my parents’ generation, “abroad” was still an almost unimaginable place. However, World War II took my father to Europe – he was in the D-Day landings and eventually got as far as Italy – and so the mystique began to dissipate. As a child, I was taken by my mother for a day in Paris and then a fortnight in Switzerland. Dad stayed home grumbling but he never wanted to go anywhere anyway. Our family never did anything unless Mum initiated it, organised it and oversaw it. Dad was a stay-at-home, only really happy in familiar surroundings, much like Fargo our Great Dane. He liked to quote that line from the World War I trenches: “If I knew a better ‘ole, I’d go to it”. Though we had seaside holidays in Britain, we never went abroad as a family. After I left home, Mum had a trip to Kenya with friends, Dad went to a bierfest in Germany (dragged there by friends) and the two of them once holidayed, most unexpectedly, in Tunisia. But that was it.

I have been considerably more relaxed about travel than either of my parents but it is not a compulsion or even a requirement for me. Of the places I have yet to visit, I would be sorry if I thought I would never get to Vienna or St Petersburg, the Amazon or Yosemite. And I would be positively distraught to learn that I had already enjoyed my last trip to New York or Rome, the Caribbean or the Far East.

I am not wholly persuaded that travel broadens the mind. My most-travelled friend (former friend nowadays) may be the most closed-minded person I ever knew (which is how he comes to be a former friend). And, as Sammy Cahn wrote: “It’s very nice to go travellin’/ But it’s so much nicer, yes it’s so much nicer to come home”.

By the by, that line I used as the title for this posting: it comes from Arthur Daley. It wasn’t written by Leon Griffiths or any other of the regular writers on Minder. George Cole’s son dreamt up the line and Cole paid him £5 for it and deployed it in an episode. I know this because, much to my surprise, I found myself acting as script executive for one series of Minder nearly twenty years ago. But that’s a story for another occasion …

MAY DAYS BE MERRY and BRIGHT

I’ve always said that autumn is the time of year that I like best, followed by spring, winter and – very much last – summer. I can’t stand heat. (Not that heat has been a summer characteristic lately; we certainly never guessed that we might have log fires burning in successive Augusts). But high summer is horticulturally the dullest time of year, in my view. And slapping on sun cream is a chore that ranks with ironing shirts.

Now I am beginning to feel that May is the most glorious month of all. Of course living surrounded by a satisfyingly unkempt garden and lots of trees and a field that is slowly being turned into a meadow means that May is more noticeable than it used to be when we lived in the city. It’s a dirty job, gracious living, but someone’s got to do it. And rather us than Tory grandees claiming public funds to have the wisteria removed from the garage roof and pipes re-laid under the tennis court.

As I slide into my dotage, it is the transience of May’s delights that tugs at the heartstrings too: the “blossomingest blossom” that the dying Dennis Potter could see from his bedroom window. Blossom doesn’t survive long, especially when it’s wet and windy. Today, like the weekend just past, is blustery between the showers but much holds on with gritted teeth, both flora and fauna. As I write, our lilacs are coming to the end of their brief span of glory. We have all three shades – dark, pale and white – vying with each other and with an ancient laburnum that is also in its full pomp, sharply contrasting with its brilliant yellow flowers (so much more arresting than the common-as-muck forsythia of early spring).

The apple and cherry blossom are done now and the magnolia so long gone it’s almost forgotten. But the late flowerers stand proud against the gale, especially the hawthorn which of course is also known as may. The old rhyme “Here we go gathering nuts in May” is really a rewrite of the notion of the nuts of the may tree – so it should be “nuts of may” – because of course there are no native plants that produce nuts in the spring. Our hedgerows – two sides of the field have full hedges – are full of white hawthorn, while square on to our conservatory is a red hawthorn, its carmine flowers just this side of full vulgarity. Its covering is at its height now. Next to the red hawthorn is an old and doubtless doomed pear tree into which David has allowed a pale pink Clematis Montana to climb. The clematis is in its best fig now. Another one, clean white, climbs along the house under the window of the shower room so that you dry yourself while gazing on the vista of the three lilacs and the laburnum with the white clematis framing the view. Elsewhere the honeysuckle has kicked in so that twilight invites a heady stroll through the garden, reeling from one outrageous perfume to the next.

Also close to the conservatory is an ash. Ashes are the property’s most numerous trees – we have not flinched to have one or two taken down for they seed promiscuously – and they are always the last to come into leaf. So while the fruit bearers and our gorgeous tulip tree – my favourite; we planted it to mark the millennium – are in full leaf, the acers are not far behind and even the tardy oaks are now well covered, the ashes still have the look of winter about them. Nothing undaunted, a pair of nuthatches are raising a brood in the long-established nesting box in the ash, despite having so little cover for their duties. We keep an eye out for magpies, crows, woodpeckers, squirrels and other predators of fledglings but we can’t manage a guard right through the hours of daylight. I feel protective towards them yet when we lived in town I wouldn’t have recognised a nuthatch if it jumped up and pecked me on the leg. Now I can tell one just from its flight, never mind needing to see one still and in repose and relative close-up.

The robins seem to have finished their child-rearing duties for the time being. They build against an outbuilding wall under the aforementioned Clematis Montana. We’ve seen fewer wrens obviously foraging this year. Maybe they nest later. Last spring we installed a so-called sparrow parade near the eaves in a roof gully. Sparrows prefer communal living. But I think we started too late and this year, at the crucial time, we had roofers up there, enough to put off any would-be nester. But sparrows have been as noticeable by their absence here as anywhere else. Does putting up a dedicated nesting box bring them in? Or do they need to be here first before the box is going to be spotted? It’s perhaps instructive that we put up a box specifically designed for nuthatches and tree creepers on the old oak, further away from our busy bird-feeders, yet the nuthatches opted for a generalised box that is on the main strip and not well protected. You can take a horse to water, you might say, but you can’t make it drink.

“What potent blood hath modest May” Emerson wrote. It is indeed a time of energy and promise. Wild deer sometimes venture into our field, despite the menace of our dogs. The fish are at last rising in the pond, having passed half a year in suspended animation near the bottom – and that’s twelve feet down. Already Ron the heron has visited several times, planning where he’ll stand to have the best chance of spearing something. I don’t rate his chances though we shall remain vigilant. But if last year’s kingfisher returns, I shall not begrudge him anything small that he can manage. He’s much too magical to resent.

EMAIL of the SPECIOUS

The Prime Minister appears wholly to have mislaid his hitherto well-attuned political instincts over the affair of the smear-mails. It has been an object lesson in how to make a bad situation much worse. The danger is that people like me who are naturally well-disposed towards Gordon Brown begin to suspect that he has lost his appetite for the fight as well as his tactical acumen. A kind of death wish seems to be settling over Downing Street, much as it did in the dog days of the Major, Callaghan and Macmillan/Douglas Home premierships.

When Brown delayed a much-demanded decision about an early election, David Cameron tried to tar him as a “ditherer”, for no better reason than that it worked for Blair against John Major – of course, it worked against Major because it was a well-landed punch. Now the opposition has a much better founded claim: that the PM is behaving like a loser.

The conventional wisdom, established now for more than eighteen months, is that the Tories will easily carry the next general election and David Cameron will be prime minister. JK Galbraith, who coined the term, noted inter alia that conventional wisdom “reserves its scorn for what it is likely to term a purely destructive or negative position”. And he went on: “In this, as so often, it manifests a sound instinct for self-preservation” [The Affluent Society 1958]. It’s hard to imagine anything more destructive or negative than the emailed falsehoods that Brown’s close associate Damian McBride proposed to circulate in the hope of undermining Cameron and his front bench (with the possible exception of those newspapers, led by Murdoch’s Sunday Times, that condemned the tactic while gleefully reproducing the gist of the smears).

The Tories’ outrage at this disclosure indeed manifests self-preservation. They have plenty of black propagandists of their own who could be unmasked in dastardly deeds. There but for the grace of political bloggers, Cameron will be muttering, goes my close team of advisors (one of whom, who bears the unlikely name of Stephen Gilbert, is obviously a wrong ’un).

Brown has made two obvious mistakes, one reactive the other systematic. The former was to let the opposition seize the initiative. As soon as McBride’s emails were in the public domain, the PM should have taken responsibility. It may stick in his craw as much as it would in mine to indulge the gesture politics of apologising, but it would have been obvious to the Number 10 advisors that those libelled in the emails would be demanding a full apology and that fair-minded people would perfectly well understand why they would do so. Brown ought to have had the nous to anticipate such a demand by pre-empting it, not painting himself into a corner wherein to apologise late looks weak and to continue to refuse to apologise looks churlish and ungracious. Brown doesn’t do gracious, even at the best of times. All the more important, then, that he avoid situations in which good grace is naturally called for.


Damian Omen 2 or McBride of Frankenstein?
pic courtesy of BBC News website

The broader mistake lies in both Brown’s and Tony Blair’s historic reliance on advisors who appear to have emerged from the mulm at the bottom of a particularly stagnant aquarium. Looking at Damian McBride, you feel that no one with any sense would trust him with the care of a boiled sweet, let alone far-reaching matters at the heart of government. Many of the others have been little better: Derek Draper, Charlie Whelan, Wilf Stevenson, Lord Levy, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser (this last also famous for ill-advised emails) – you would have thought giving any of them positions of trust was something of a gamble. It becomes increasingly clear that people like these have persistently briefed against the imagined rivals of Blair/Brown within the Labour Party quite as extensively as against the official opposition. Apologists for Blair and Brown argue – with no great conviction – that these attack dogs were not licensed by their masters and hence those masters should not be blamed for their dogs’ bad behaviour. As a dog owner, I know full well that any breach of law, peace or etiquette committed by a dog of mine is my own responsibility. This whole sorry/not sorry business does raise vexing questions about both Blair and Brown and their skill at reading character and at understanding what is appropriate.

In Gordon Brown’s case, another resonance comes into play. Not since Aneurin Bevan, who once described the Tory front bench as “scum”, has a senior Labour politician evinced such gut distaste for the party opposite. This tends to breed the suspicion that Brown will not desist from low tactics if they will do Mr Cameron a piece of no-good, even just for the hell of it. This is a perilous instinct. The British still have a finely tuned nose for fair play and recoil from politicians, however exulted, who appear to be stooping to try to conquer. Only a few days ago, the Prime Minister was justly basking in the glow of a good G20. If he has frittered away that good will in a gruesome and demeaning domestic disaster, he really has only himself to blame.

DOWN HERE on a VISIT

Tomorrow, March 21st, is the first day of Spring. Actually, some argue that today, being the Vernal Equinox this year, is the first day of Spring. I was always taught that the seasons begin on the 21st of the month irrespective of the small changes in the dates of the equinoxes (equinoces? – on the analogy with index and indices?); one tends to cleave to early teachings.

At any rate, spring certainly didn’t begin on March 1st. The political parties, ever spinning reality to make it seem more attractive, each call their opening gathering of the year The Spring Conference, even when it takes place in February. But it’s no good putting your faith in politicians.

A few years ago, the weather forecaster Penny Tranter mentioned in passing that it was the first day of spring. I checked the calendar. It was March 1st. I wrote to inform Ms Tranter that I had been taught that the first day of spring was the 21st. When and why had she changed it? Ms Tranter wrote back, very promptly and fully. She reckoned that meteorologists measure the seasons by quarters beginning on the 1st of the month, rather than from the equinox. I found this rather unconvincing. Meanwhile, Michael Fish had explained much the same thing on air. Every viewer but me must have wondered why he suddenly felt the need to launch into this subject. Nevertheless, my letter has changed the thinking at the Met Office in a way I could not have anticipated. On March 21st the following year, Helen Willetts announced; “It’s officially the start of spring today”. On March 21st the year after that, Daniel Corbett was saying the same when I switched him off (I can’t watch Corbett and still keep my sense either of humour or of proportion). Nevertheless, I suspect I am fighting a losing battle over the ”official” First Day of Spring. Another gallant but doubtless doomed fight is to keep the designation of this coming Sunday what it has been historically – Mothering Sunday – rather than what the transatlantic media calls it – Mother’s Day.

Spring heralds the houseguest season. Indeed, the season has already begun at our gaff. Having friends to stay is an almost wholly unmixed blessing. Apart from the particular pleasures associated with particular visitors, the generality of these visits suggests far more to raise the spirits than to lower them. First of all, it means we have to do some cleaning. This is a necessity from which we gain as much as do our guests. I confess that, while my partner and I are in many ways opposites (a lark and an owl, for instance; a nurse and a patient), we share an almost limitless capacity for squalor. If no one ever came to the door, we might well succumb to a sea of paper, discarded clothes and dust. Actually, the dust is under rather tighter control since our little dog Tati, the one who has suffered a major sight loss recently, was diagnosed last year as atopic, which means that among his twenty-odd allergies are dust mites. So we need to pay attention to the level of dust.

Something David and I also share is a tendency to solitude. It is no hardship for either of us to be confined to our shared company or – often even better – the company of none, not even each other. Happily, our house is large enough for this to be practicable. For David to pass the day in the garden while I fill the same time in my study makes us both as happy as pigs in muck. Neither of us wants such days to be unavoidably the norm but to have the choice is very heaven. To have this complaisant peace shattered is of course a most welcome change. We genuinely relish visitors.

Solitude can make you cranky, isolated, wary and inured to matters that you ought not to neglect to tend. Visitors bring important input: the direct or vicarious perspective of different generations, different circumstances, different geographies, different cultural textures. Sometimes, they even bring political and other challenges to one’s settled views. This is essential stimulus. And just as it is patently good for our dogs to have socialising with people reinforced by a steady traffic of intruders upon their territory, so it is equally good – nourishing, challenging, expanding – for us.

I think, hope and believe that we show our guests a good time. With few exceptions, they are temporarily escaping life in the city (usually but not always London) and are taken aback all over again by the restorative powers to be found even within spitting distance of the A4. It helps a lot: a) that our house was long ago re-orientated away from the road and towards open fields (and the guest bedrooms are on that side of the house); b) that the journey from London by road or rail is a snip while psychologically the distance is vast; c) that our guestrooms and especially the beds are very comfortable; d) that David is a fabulous (trained) cook; e) that we are, I think I can claim, in no way proscriptive.

Needless to say, we have made mistakes. An early guest, whom we dearly wanted to make welcome, insisted on coming at a time when there were builders here, not merely at but in the house. Our guest – let’s call him Andrew – is himself a noted and fastidious cook. We weren’t up to speed yet with the kitchen and even found ourselves offering Andrew a takeaway one evening. When he complained about a splash mark he’d noticed on the bathroom mirror (which is the full length of the wall), David lost sympathy and has little regret that he has steadfastly never returned.

Another guest – Ruth, say – came with her husband (Robert) and child. We had already got off slightly on a wrong foot over some footling misunderstanding about what the child was prepared to eat. On the second day, Ruth couldn’t stop herself, over Robert’s objections, asking David why we didn’t use liners under the pillowcases. David dealt with the query civilly enough but he was furious because he had spent more than the issue deserved looking for the missing items the morning before. After that, things flew downhill. I handed Ruth a glass of sherry that she promptly handed back because the glass was clearly cracked. How had that happened? At lunch, I was mortified to spot a flake of some previous morning’s cereal still attached to the bowl from which she was about to attack her pudding. The visit’s sense of being doomed has been reinforced by Ruth’s kind but firm refusal of a repetition of the experience. The innocent child would, I swear, come like a shot if allowed, though more to see the dogs than us.

Other visitors have been less than well attended. In David’s absence I served to guests from the Americas a bowl of home grown raspberries that, had I been more attentive, I might have noted were more mouldy than good. On another occasion, my culinary innocence was revealed by the offering of a dish – “the Aga is perfect for this” – that inadvertently lacked one of its major ingredients; a little short of perfection on that occasion and no fault of the Aga.

On the other hand, there have been guests who have fallen short of our own expectations. The most tenacious of guest faults is the (no doubt earnest) desire to “help”. As we sometimes bark at strangers who stray into the kitchen: “no passengers in the engine room, thank you – please return to the sundeck”. Stopping them clearing the table requires eternal vigilance because it’s the kind of gesture that they can slip past you without you registering that it has begun: the major alert usually comes with the question “where shall I put this?” to which the only sensible rejoinder is of course: “back on the table”.

“Helping” to clear the table is the thin end of the wedge. Once they’ve persuaded you to let them “help” with the washing up, the peace of the house is doomed. I learned this long ago. In my childhood, when Christmas Day was hosted turn and turn about by different households within the extended family, there was a lame-brained “uncle” (by marriage not blood, I hasten to add) who always took it upon himself to “do” the washing up and who, without fail, broke at least one item every year, to my mother’s white fury when it was one of hers. Before we hardened our own hearts against those who would take over the sink, we did permit one or two minor washings-up to be conducted by guests. I think it was the six weeks it took us afterwards to find the potato peeler that finished that foolish weakness.

Guests have other traits that do them no credit, from commandeering the television (particularly for some seemingly endless sports event) to misunderstanding the function of the bidet to making off with the toothpaste or a book that was in the process of being read by one of us. But no one has yet come close to the nightmare of one of our first guests. Admittedly, we had already been warned by mutual friends that ‘Miles’ was “the houseguest from hell” so we should have known better than to admit him. Like many who have lived alone for years, he has lost all notion of consideration for others.

As it happened, he and I travelled down from London on the train together. I had asked him (as we always do) if he had any particular dietary requirements and he announced that he was indeed on a special diet at that time. I no longer recall the details, save that potatoes were not permitted. This did not prevent him from consuming an entire 150-gram bag of kettle chips, which he declared to be “not the same”. Aside from the diet, he claimed to be easy to feed, so long as he was able to have his daily Marmite. I couldn’t remember if we had this item in the cupboard and couldn’t raise David to ask him (this was before either of us had a mobile phone) so I purchased a jar ahead of the train journey, only being able to put my hand on the largest size. Needless to say, it turned out that we had an almost full jar in the cupboard (the new one eventually had to be thrown out); that was irritating enough, though not quite as irritating as the fact that Miles never once touched the Marmite during the endless week of his visit.

What else did he do? He was forever leaving ajar the door of the fridge (which he visited often and without a by-your-leave), justifying the laxity by claiming that his cats were always opening his own fridge and failing to close it. After he had taken a bath, I found he had trampled under the bathmat my own towel, which he dismissed as “some old thing”. He complained because on one or two occasions he was down before me in the morning (though never before David) as if somehow I had an obligation to be up and ready to wait on him each day. I pointed out that, unlike him, I did not take a lengthy siesta after lunch, an irrelevant point as far as he was concerned.

None of this, I am sure, seems much of a trial but it all came wrapped in a loud and insistent expectation that he deserved all the consideration that the white colonialist would demand of his coolies. We were profoundly glad to see the back of him, as we indeed have done definitively because a few years later we came to the realisation that, living abroad as he now does, he had dropped us from his contact list without a word of explanation. Perhaps he was afraid that we might want to visit him as we did once long ago when he lived in another foreign land. On that occasion, we arrived laden with the comestibles and other items he missed from Britain and found ourselves sleeping each on one of the two foam mattresses that served as his regular bed, while he slept on a rather comfortable-looking futon that he had borrowed for the duration of our stay. I wish we had had the foresight to leave his fridge door open.

Next week I shall be in London, staying as the houseguest of someone else. I hope I shall manage to comport myself with proper but modest deference.

PS: This week's was a fabulous episode of Desperate Housewives. For the benefit of my international readers, it was episode 13 of season 4, a self-contained story entitled The Best Thing That Ever Could Have Happened which, like many of the best episodes, is named after a Stephen Sondheim number, the kind of allusion that alerts those viewers likely to know that they will share a sensibility with this show. Beau Bridges played a handyman who had come to know the various housewives professionally but also as something of a confidant. It was a finely-turned portrait of a good man, neat and economical, sentimental but not superficial and it also shed passing light on each of the regular characters. What a terrific piece of bread-and-butter television, as nourishing as it was delicious.

Tati, summer 2007
photo: Barbra Flinder

The ONE-EYED DOG is KING

An update on Tati (further to the previous entry, Dog Days, immediately below): our PBGV is half-way through an enforced period of wearing one of those inverted lampshade affairs that prevent him scratching the delicate areas (in his case, the eyes) and, in practice, pretty much anywhere else. This of course is frustrating and uncomfortable for him. He is not supposed to get excited or to bark much or to go tearing off round our field so he is often walked on the lead (which is attached to a harness so as not to interfere with the lampshade) and, because he is naturally ebullient even in his reduced circumstances, he finds this stressful.

The worst part – perhaps even more for us than for him – is that he has suffered significant sight loss. His right eye, which underwent the operation, is now permanently longsighted so that he can see what he is aiming at but not necessarily what is along the route. And that is his good eye. His left eye has a partially detached front lens that is being held in place by the iris, which is functioning normally. The right iris was unable to do this job, which was why he had to lose the lens. But it means that effectively he has no useful sight in his left eye. So he finds himself much like Gordon Brown: blind in one eye and partially sighted in the other. Perhaps he too can raise 17 standing ovations in Congress.

On Monday he will again see the specialist and we shall learn where we go from here. It may be necessary at some juncture to operate similarly on the left eye or we may have to continue to medicate and monitor it, perhaps for the rest of his life. Currently, he is taking an extensive regime of medication, most but not all in the form of eye drops. He accepts all this with what, in a human, you would call good grace. In canine terms, he has certainly not lost his wag and, when distracted from his condition, he is still capable of getting excited about the prospect of a game or a walk, though of course we have to damp down any such excitement.

It is all most distressing but, as I say, more distressing for us who discuss and fear and speculate and question than for the dog who finds himself perplexed and quelled but, to pick up my refrain from Dog Days, living in the moment and adjusting and coping.

PS: What an outstanding episode of Shameless on Channel 4 this week, written by Jack Lothian and directed by Paul Norton Waller. Even though it was part of an on-going serial dreamt up by someone else (the mighty Paul Abbott), it still managed to shift some telling material and fashion some powerful individual scenes. British teledrama is still – just – alive and kicking.

DOG DAYS

The last ten days have reinforced my conviction that humans can learn a good deal from animals. I am thinking in particular of dogs, but creatures at almost any stratum of evolution have something of value to tell us.

I am not unaware of my capacity to be a dog bore but I defend my frequent bending of my friends’ ears on the subject of our dogs by pointing out that we have listened patiently to their reports about their children for more than two decades without (much) complaint (at least, not to them). You might argue that dogs are not as “important” as children and I decline to engage the point. I will say, though, that dogs are assuredly a rather larger responsibility than children. There is not much mileage in packing dogs off to school or sending them to the high street with a shopping list and an injunction that they are to bring back the change (and not eat all the sausages on the way home). In the unfortunate circumstance that he attacked somebody, it is unlikely that your child would be, as they say, “put down”.

You expect that your children will grow up and leave you and you hope that they will duly outlive you, whereas a dog is for life, its span being something most likely to be subsumed within yours. While it might at a pinch survive ferally (quite a few do), a dog is entirely dependent on you, while in your charge, for its shelter, sustenance and general welfare. You can’t teach it to make itself an omelette or take its worming tablets on the due date.

Both my partner David and I were brought up with dogs and we have known many mutts belonging to others over the years. In his various domestic posts, David (who worked as “char to the stars”) often performed dog-sitting and dog–exercising duties and necessarily but easily bonded with his charges. As responsible and sensitive people, we manfully held off through many years of keen broodiness for a dog because we knew that our circumstances did not lend themselves. I have no doubt that many – perhaps most – dogs lead the “lives of quiet desperation” that Thoreau said were the lot of men. We wanted no dog of ours to enjoy less than a safe, stimulating and contented existence. Only in the last decade have we found ourselves able to make such provision.

The first and most defining aspect of dogs is that they are pack animals. Even if the pack consists of no more than the dog and a single owner, the dog nonetheless has its pack therein and needs to feel sure that the pack endures. Separation anxiety is one of the most common and most powerful stresses that a dog experiences. It follows then that a dog left on its own all day at home while the family – its pack – scatters is a dog that is profoundly miserable on a continuous basis. If the dog then tries to assuage its misery – veering from boredom through frustration and even to terror – with behaviour that a senior member of the pack (its master or mistress) deems to be destructive, it will perhaps be “punished” without gaining any sense of why this further misery is visited upon it.

Both of us are at home most of the time. Four hours is our limit for going out and leaving the dogs in the house, where they at least have the company of each other. Longer and we arrange for the neighbours to visit and let them out and, if necessary, to feed them. When we go away, we have house-sitters who know and happily look after the dogs.

We have our own field adjacent to our property in which the dogs are exercised. They are fed natural raw foods according to the BARF diet (see www.barfworld.com). They do not suffer the indignity of being dressed in dog versions of human clothes and are not treated as if they are somehow “little people”. They are, by any standard, lucky dogs. None of this – nor can it – guarantees that they will lead trouble-free lives.

The senior of our dogs, at seven-and-a-half, is a Great Dane, named Fargo after a movie we both love. His likeness provides the avatar on this blog. More than any dog I have ever known, Fargo has been a supreme ambassador for his species. When we first took him to training class (which he still attends, if fitfully), he was alluded to by certain of the more nervous owners as “the beast”, but before long even the most reluctant had begun to dote on him. Now, when there is an exercise that obliges us to handle a dog other than our own, people clamour for his leash. Among our houseguests, he ranks with David’s cooking and the comfort of our guest rooms as one of the chief lures. Even those indifferent to dogs – it seems odd that we should know such people – are comparatively won over. He is that walking cliché, a gentle giant. People anyway do take him for a giant at some ten-and-a-half stone. In fact, he was the runt of an unthinkably large litter of 11 and, though sturdily knit, often stands a little below other Danes we meet. But I would gratefully accept a tenner from everyone who has, however “subtly”, ascribed to him some equine quality (“if you saddled him up, my little daughter would love to ride him, ho-ho-ho”). Fargo takes it all with better grace than do I.

Our Dane is in the twilight of his years. Decades – indeed, centuries – of selective breeding have produced many strains of dog that are much bigger than the animals from which they originated, but their organs have not grown apace. Big dogs have small dogs’ hearts and inevitably they fail sooner. If we get Fargo to ten – and, with his healthy lifestyle, we hope to do so – we shall have achieved something admirable. Meanwhile, he has this year undergone a sad little operation. Variously afflicted by anal polyps and occasional traces of blood in his water, he was thoroughly examined by our superb vet who determined that his issues were hormonal and that a complete and speedy remedy was castration. Most reluctantly we acceded and the unkindest cut was made. I shall ever recall the two little boys – perhaps eight years old – whom we and Fargo passed at the village fête some years ago, only to overhear the stage whisper “cor, did you see the balls on him”. David and I both knew to whom the remark referred.

It must be said that the dog has been unmanned – or undogged – with remarkably little effect that one might call deplorable. His attempts to make love to his favourite chair have declined and his enthusiastic (and noisy) autofellating in response to the protein rush of his supper of raw chicken wings has ceased entirely. There is no evidence of regret about this on his part, hence none on ours. The junior dog made a few half-hearted attempts to renew his bid to be top dog but soon abandoned the mission. Fargo seems perfectly reconciled to his new state and, happily for all of us, is no longer inclined to spend long sessions in licking his poorly bum for the simple reason that it is no longer poorly.

The younger dog is a little over five and he is a Petit Basset Griffon Vendéen. That is quite a rare breed in this country, rather more common in France – the Vendée is the region on the Atlantic coast immediately to the south of Normandy. The breed name indicates that he is a small (about the size of a Cocker Spaniel), low-slung, rough-coated hound. There is also a Grand version: we have surprisingly seen one in our town. He has a beard and moustache, Denis Healey eyebrows and a sunburst of hair between his eyes. Like Fargo, he is a scent hound but he has a much more cultivated nose. He is tricolore – white, black and tan – and carries his tail very erect and ever ready to wag. We call him Tati, after the great French comic and director Jacques Tati, in part because, while he is certainly blithe and drôle, he will never be lanky but he can always aspire to be so. Unfortunately, some people who are not cinéaste think his name is a girl’s and so, being pretty, he must be a bitch. Very properly, he barks at this nonsense.

We first clapped eyes on a member of his breed in Central Park and, polite Englishmen that we are, asked his off-hand Manhattan mistress if we might say hello to him. When we asked of what breed he was, she shrugged “PBGV” as if only out-of-towners like us would not know this. It isn’t the easiest breed name to remember but I recommend to friends that they think of him as Stevie’s PBGV.

Tati is a most energetic dog, full of enthusiasm for every next move. He has learned shrewdly how to handle the much larger Fargo and pays court to him, cleaning his ears and eyes regularly and smartly leaping out of the way when Fargo goes on one of his mad tazzes round the field, less frequently these days. I am acutely aware of the need to avoid anthropomorphising the dogs and so I write this with due thought. But I think Tati is a very kind little dog. That kindness, though, is not an intention; it is a result.

For all our dedication to a healthy regime, both of them have suffered dermatological problems. Such afflictions are anyway almost universal among dogs, especially those who, like ours, live in an environment that is also visited by foxes, deer, badgers, hedgehogs and all manner of other infection- and parasite-bearing wildlife.

Both dogs are regularly medicated in their exposed regions – ears, pits – but Tati’s troubles of this nature, harder to detect under his dense coat, are the more resistant to treatment and, following a battery of tests, the vet has now determined that he is atopic. This means that he is allergic to a wide variety of phenomena – pollen, grass seeds, dust mites, storage mites – and needs more regular treatment. A dedicated vaccination is being prepared for him, designed to alleviate the worst aspects of the condition, and we currently await the insurers’ decision as to whether to pick up the tab for this ambitious treatment.

Last year, Fargo injured his eye. This is not uncommon among dogs who are apt to stick their noses into things without much caution. The eye didn’t heal as fast as it should and, somewhat alarmingly, the vet decided to injure the eye again, following a well-established procedure, the result of which was that the eye soon healed completely. Early this year, Tati suffered a similar injury. His eye also failed to heal immediately; indeed the cornea became disturbingly cloudy. Then he began to misjudge distances and objects at night. Further examination suggested that there might be a deeper-seated problem and he was referred to a specialist. Then his condition rapidly worsened. At this point, we understood that his cloudy eye was his “good” eye and that the more serious matter concerned the lens in his other eye. The complication of a fierce infection in the affected eye now arose. By this time, the dog was visiting the vet daily and undergoing a regime of medication daily adjusted to meet the latest development in his condition. Like his atopic status, the problem with his lens appears to be hereditary.

The crisis has now, we believe, peaked. As I write, Tati is some 100 miles away, kept overnight at a seaside veterinary surgery where, this afternoon, he underwent an operation to remove the front lens of his right eye. This lens was in grave danger of becoming wholly detached and causing more extensive damage than would the operation. The result, we are assured, is that he will be no worse than long-sighted, a condition shared by David. With his unrivalled nose, he should be able to adjust very happily.

And what have I learned from this peculiarly harrowing ten days wherein, pretty much by the by, workmen have daily clattered above us removing and restoring about a third of the area of our roof? Well, it has been instructive to see how the dog adjusted to each development of his condition and attempted to compensate. There is no doubt that he was brought low – indeed, all but overwhelmed – by the complication of the infection, the pain of which needed to be addressed by painkillers. I choose my descriptions with care. I think it would be anthropomorphic to call him depressed but he was certainly, objectively subdued.

I have thought before – and these days have reinforced the thought – that dogs live wholly in the moment. They of course have memories but these might be properly characterised as sense memories: retrieving the appearance and especially the scent of someone who once petted them; retaining a few words of command; recognising the route to a place where they have been carefree; feeling that a meal is due. Tati has had to cope with a changing degree of sight. There was a day or two when he was effectively almost blind, particularly at night, and had to be led round the field. But he works at it, adjusting and compensating. When he returns home with impaired vision tomorrow, he will work with what he has rather than moping because of what he has not. Now that the antibiotics and soothing ointments have done their work and the pain and discomfort that afflicted him are lifted, he will soon get his mojo back. He will learn how to steer around the close hazards in the field and the house and how to cope with differing light levels.

The experience of watching a dog play the hand he is dealt makes one reflective. I have been thinking how the gifts that we humans have (and animals do not have) complicate as well as deepen our experience of existence. Because we have language, we have the means to articulate worry and anticipation, sympathy and intent. I have troubles of my own with my eyesight. Because I have language, I may learn about my condition and my prospects, my treatment and my options. Because I can describe my experiences, I retain them as narratives and so can assess and compare them in quite a detailed way. Unlike animals, humans do not live in the moment. Arguably we live far more in the past and future – I mean, simultaneously – than in the present.

To the question “What is mankind’s greatest invention or discovery?”, I have often thought the answer is not the conventional notion of fire or the wheel or the combustion engine or penicillin or reality television (joke) but the twofold skills that must be learned anew in every generation and by which we break free of nature and become humans: walking upright and talking. With these means, having made the wheel, we can stroll over to the next valley and tell the people there about it. By walking upright, we learn to ride upright and we free our forearms for tasks other than walking (making calls on our mobile phones, for instance). By using language, we create concepts and find the means of exploring and accounting for the world around us. These accomplishments are what Tati cannot do. Because he cannot stand and use his front paws and understand the notions of illness, disability, treatment and cure, he cannot medicate himself nor know to do so. I can do all these things but I cannot, like Tati, discard my known past or imagined future experiences and avoid speculation, calculation, hope and dread.

We are at once liberated and oppressed by our evolution. We have fashioned the world to fit with our upright stance so that most activities suit our facing forwards at head height, the hands free to perform tasks, the legs able to convey us or to execute manoeuvres. One price is that about a third of the human race suffers some degree of back pain or damage because it is not natural for us to walk, sit and do things upright; another is that many of us suffer from too much pressure on our legs and/or feet; and we fret about our armpits made sweaty because they are “unnaturally” kept less aerated than if we proceeded on all fours.

Because we have language, we have invented the notions of dismay, hope, resentment, loyalty, blame, admiration, mendacity, courage, love, hate and all the rest. These complications may have enriched but they have not necessarily lightened man’s short span. John Stuart Mill asked whether it was better to be a happy pig or an unhappy Socrates. The irony in the question is that only the unhappy Socrates would think to ask.

HOMING IN ON MOBILES

There is, to be sure, a sufficiency of candidates for the title Most Baleful Development of the Last Half Century: the marketing culture; the revival of religious fanaticism; the death of modesty, kindness and respect for oneself and others; the worship of convenience; the spread of noise and light pollution; television advertising; the decline of literary culture; the despoiling of the countryside; the power of celebrity; global tourism; the rise of the supermarket and the retail chain; climate change; and that which promotes and underpins all those horrors: the triumph of capitalism.

If I cite the ubiquity of the mobile phone as an especial bête noire of mine, it is in no way to discount or downgrade the egregiousness of the other candidates. But the mobile is in so many ways the type of what is so unhealthy in modern society. Far from bringing people together more easily, it in practice drives them further apart. From the vanishingly few occasions when I have talked into a mobile while, say, walking along the street or sitting on a bus, I know that one is immediately cocooned in a virtually impenetrable void. One’s awareness of the world beyond one’s nose and inner ear declines almost to nothing. People yakking on mobiles bump into each other, step off the curb in front of traffic, fall down open manholes and generally are as cut off from their immediate surroundings as if they were sealed in a time machine.

When you consider that we have been using telephones for more than a century, it seems extraordinary that people generally still find them mysterious. We have all undergone the experience of having someone else in the room trying to talk to us while we are on the telephone. They – and we too when we in turn do it ourselves – seem incapable of remembering that it is physically impossible simultaneously to attune one ear to a voice coming down an optic fibre and the other ear to a voice in the wholly different aural ambience of a room. Yet there is probably more domestic unpleasantness deriving from just such insensitivity than, say, arguments over child rearing and housework combined.

The voice in one’s ear fundamentally erodes one’s awareness of everything else, even what one sees. Listening to such a voice requires a high level of concentration and focus that, say, listening to the wireless does not emulate. That is certainly why using a mobile while driving, whether hands-free or not, is a truly criminal example of irresponsibility. New penalties for this offence come into force in the spring in Britain. Anyone who causes a fatality while simultaneously driving and using a hand-held mobile will be liable to a jail term of between four and seven years, or between two and five years if they were “briefly distracted”, whatever that may mean. Nothing like enough punishment, of course, and I never understand why anyone who has been responsible for killing or maiming in any circumstance while driving is ever allowed a licence again.

Mobile phones bring out the insensitivity in people. If, in the middle of a conversation with a friend, I suddenly picked up the newspaper and started reading it, my friend would be justly aggrieved. I, though, am expected to countenance as perfectly acceptable behaviour my friend breaking off in mid-sentence to take a mobile phone call. What’s more, my friend will, as like as not, raise her voice considerably above the decibel level at which she had hitherto been addressing me. This is another of the abiding mysteries of the phone, that it seems to require – although it doesn’t really, of course – much greater projection in order that the voice travels the distance, maybe of hundreds of miles, between the speakers.

My partner pointed out this quote, used to recommend a book on Amazon: “You become absorbed in the plot within seconds of opening the book … It will make you think twice before using your mobile phone!!!!” He found this an appalling criterion to apply to the appeal of a book and I would agree if I didn’t already suspect that the use of four exclamation marks indicates a poverty-stricken mind. But the psychological dependence on the mobile that so many have developed is an earnest of the poverty of imagination and character that is eroding the human race. We are certainly breeding a generation of teenagers who cannot sit still or walk along for five minutes without reaching for the mobile and swapping cries of “whatever” with a friend. Being interested in their surroundings or – I am about to employ a blasphemy – reading a book is too daunting a project. So I suppose the anonymous Amazon customer was onto something.

Some train services – First Direct, which serves the west of England, is one such – have understood that the mobile phone is as noisome an intruder as the leaking iPod and have designated one carriage per train as “quiet”, which means that the use of phones is barred. For having the temerity to wish to sit in such a carriage, you are duly punished by being obliged to walk the length of the platform because the quiet carriage is always at the extremity of the train.

This arrangement would, you might think, work tolerably well but it is rare in my experience that such a journey passes without some breach. On the train home from Cheltenham last week, my reading was interrupted by the ringing of a mobile across the aisle. The mousy, mature and respectable-looking woman who took the call was entirely and even somewhat abashedly apologetic afterwards when I pointed out to her (in my customary formula) that the sign forbidding the use of mobiles applied to her as well to everyone else. “I’m afraid I forgot to switch it off,” she said. “I will do now”. I didn’t pursue it but I could reasonably have suggested that she either switch off the mobile directly it rang and determine later who had made the call that she missed or get up off her arse and walk to the next carriage to pursue her conversation. I also didn’t observe drily: “I take it you won’t now object if I smoke just the one cigarette?”

The trouble with these provisions and their abuse is that one is obscurely made to feel in some way in the wrong when one speaks up, as if I’m making a fuss about nothing. As David, who frequently catches a doze on a train, points out, if a ringing phone or a voice raised in conversation has roused you, the damage is already done so you’re then trying to put down a marker for the next time. But as I observe frequently in my book Common Sense (see link in right margin), NOBODY COMPLAINS ENOUGH and it is left to the civic- (if bloody-)minded like me and David to make a stand.

Do not, I beg, misconstrue me. I do indeed own a mobile. So does my partner. When we added a large dog to our household, David pointed out that we ought to be able to call each other if, say, one of us were in our field with this dog that neither of us could lift on his own and the dog – perish the thought – were to collapse.

For that reason and none other we went into Bath one day in 2001 or 2002 to purchase a brace of mobile phones. We chose our moment carefully, timing our quest to coincide with an “important” football match involving the national team. Bath was not exactly deserted but it was striking that all the young men out shopping were paired with wives or girlfriends (or boyfriends). Our plan paid off inasmuch as we were able to have the undivided attention of a mobile phone saleswoman for above an hour. I did have to return my phone quite soon, however. I couldn’t stand it that every time I switched it on I got a display on the screen that read “How are you?” To eliminate this absurdity, I had to settle for an older and less capacious Sim card but that was no great hardship.

We elected to go with a plan that rolled over unused time and charged a monthly fee. I recently changed the arrangement to pay-as-you-go. In practice, my mobile is usually switched off from one month’s end to the next, aside from an occasional switch-on to send or look for a text. David gets more from his mobile but neither of us finds much use for it. The only time I have mine in hand with any frequency is when I am in London where having it avoids the need to look for a phone box. Even then, the mobile is switched off a lot because I spend so much time in cinemas and theatres and I won’t have it switched on if I’m lunching with a friend.

To change the phone plan was not straightforward. I telephoned – always an elaborate business these days, involving punching in numbers in response to options none of which quite fits your case – and finally thought I had secured a change of plan. But the next bill repeated the previous formula so I telephoned again. It emerged that my instructions should have been put in writing (rather undermining the point of an arrangement about a phone) although I had not been told this. I was excused the task (out of compassion, perhaps, for what was perceived as my great age) and assured that the next bill would reflect the new arrangement. That bill arrived today and is indeed lower by some 65 percent. We have been paying through the nose until now.

People say “I don’t know how I managed before I had a mobile” without recalling that once people managed without computers, central heating, television, the motor car, flushing lavatories, reading glasses, credit, separate dwellings, the wheel or even a spoken language. We didn’t have a dishwasher until we moved to our current house less than ten years ago but now that it has broken down I find (as washer-upper to the household) that I cannot imagine we ever did anything else all day but wash up. The dishwasher, though, is a far less destructive intruder than the mobile. Indeed, it makes time for one to do more useful things, rather than filling such time with useless chitchat.

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A word about Gordon Brown in China: the PM has been criticized in some quarters for not attacking his hosts ferociously for their appalling record on human rights. I find this criticism unrealistic. It would be at best uncomfortable to find fault with a regime with which one is seeking to establish at least a rapport. Far better to develop a strong relationship with the Chinese government and then, from the vantage point of being seen as a candid friend, seek to influence the Chinese to do better. At the present stage of relations, such a criticism would merely be discounted in Beijing as posturing for the domestic audience. And not without reason.