Mad dogs and Englishmen. And dogs less mad

“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.”

A good line from a Noël Coward song. Performed as background when we see Coward himself, playing the British – I should say English – spy chief stalking along a Cuban street in the classic film of Our Man in Havana.

It’s an inverted boast, of course. It sounds self-deprecating. The English poking fun at themselves, for walking out under the strongest of suns when everyone is sensibly horizontal for a siesta, or at least under cover in the shade. Crazy, right? Except that it’s an endearing fault. And there’s even a suggestion that it’s proof of a certain rather admirable courage and strength. Unique to the English.

You know, the qualities – if such they are – which made the Empire:

At twelve noon the natives swoon
And no further work is done
But mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun

Indeed, when we see Coward in the film, he’s carefully buttoned up, with tie and hat, in a classic English suit entirely appropriate for the City of London, but rather less so for the noonday streets of Havana.

Noël Coward in Our Man in Havana

I like the film. And I like Graham Greene’s book, on which the film is based, even more. It’s about an intelligence fabricator. When the undisputed master of the spy genre, John le Carré, came to write his own book about an intelligence pedlar, The Tailor of Panama, he had to pay homage to Greene’s Our Man in Havana. It’s the exemplar of this sub-genre, and it sets the bar high. I’m not quite sure that The Tailor of Panama, fine though it is, entirely clears that bar.

However, I digress. It does sometimes occur to me that, implied boast or not, I too sometimes slip into the category of Englishmen who go out in the midday sun. Partly, perhaps, because I was born and spent my early childhood in Rome, and that has left me a constant hankering for heat. Blistering summer? It powers my batteries.

And blistering summer is upon us here in Spain, with the temperatures in the thirties already (no, no, American friends – that’s in real degrees – the nineties in your outmoded system). I revel in it.

Not everyone agrees. Our neighbour Isabel, hearing that our granddaughter Matilda was coming to stay, put all her skills to work to make her a doll. And a wonderful doll it is, too. Then, given the heat we’re experiencing, she decided to make the doll a hat too. It’s much needed in current conditions.

Well, we haven’t tried it on Matilda’s new doll yet. But we have tried it on Matilda herself. It’s maybe not quite her size, but it strikes me as just right for her in every other way. Don’t you agree?

Matilda modelling her doll's hat
assisted by her grandmother

I had a useful lesson in how not everyone sees the heat my way this very morning. I plunged into our local woods with our dogs, striding confidently and comfortably along the paths.

But then I suddenly noticed that Toffee was no longer with us.

This is worrying. Luci, our black toy poodle, never goes too far. Even if she’s put off by a much larger dog (and practically every dog is larger than she is), she’ll just run off a short way into the undergrowth, following along a parallel path, always aware of where we are, so she can rejoin us just as soon as the immediate threat has passed.

Not so Toffee. She can be distracted by many things she shouldn’t go near. A pile of fresh horse dung (yep, we have riders in the woods too). The mouldering remains of a discarded sandwich. Anything she could eat or roll in, to deplorable effect.

The worst is that, being a kind of tan colour – officially, it’s apricot, but basically it looks tan – she tends to blend into the countryside. And since she’s living proof that there’s none so deaf as them that doesn’t want to hear, she can disappear for just as long as she likes, while I rush around searching and calling for her uselessly, in growing panic.

Not this time though. I simply backtracked along the way I’d come. And there she was. She’d found a patch of shade along the sun-drenched path. And she’d simply stretched out in it.

Thus far and no further. Pal.
With Luci in the background, already heading home

The message was clear. “You want to keep walking? Be my guest. But in this temperature, this is more than far enough for me. I want to go home.”

Of course, I went along with her, and took us all three home again. After all, I was in debt to her for an invaluable lesson.

Mad dogs and Englishmen may indeed go out in the midday sun.

But sane dogs don’t.