Mostly Mild Max

People talk about a ‘one-month anniversary’, don’t they? Unfortunately, my ingrained pedantry rebels at that expression, since the whole point about the prefix ‘anni’ is that it relates to a year. We need a different word.

My humble proposal (and I pride myself on my humility) is ‘mensiversary’.

Max moving in
‘Hey, who’s this other dog?’

The second of April was the first mensiversary of the latest addition to our household. That’s the arrival of Max. He’s a Podenco, a classic Spanish dog, which makes our taking one a symbol of our assimilation to our adopted nation. 

Not that the symbolism was the reason we took him. We need exercise and our Toy Poodles, Luci and Toffee, for all the joy they bring us, have had pretty much as much walking as they can stand when we get to half an hour. Max feels he’s barely got going when he’s done 5 km (3 miles if you insist on sticking with the measures of the empire) and he likes that twice a day, so he keeps us very much on our feet before leaving us on our backs. 

Like many nations the world over, Spain is a highly divided society. People of opposing views glare at each across a chasm of incomprehension on many issues – the rights of immigrants, the status of Catalonia, the appropriateness of kissing a football player on the lips without her consent and, in particular, on animal welfare. As well as the fans, there are those who regard bullfighting as a barbaric form of entertainment obtained by torturing an animal before putting him to death. Hunting, too, is divisive, between those who see it as a sport and those who regard it as a way to take pleasure from the killing of living things. And there are hunters who like to use Podencos for a year or two and then abandon them by a roadside somewhere, while in the opposite camp are those who try to take them to shelters that give them all the care charitable donations allow them to provide. 

Max was one of the rescued. Not that he was Max when we met him. Someone had given him the name ‘Hannover’ which, as well as being a bit of a mouthful for a dog’s name, made no sense given he had absolutely no connection with Germany. ‘Max’ is short, easy to say and easy to recognise, which is what a dog’s name needs to be.

So Max he became. Not in any way in tribute to the ‘Mad Max’ of Hollywood fame. He’s about as sane as they come. I’ve never known a dog with a temperament as quiet and gentle as his. It was a week before we heard him so much as bark.

That isn’t the reputation of the Podenco breed.

‘Oh, you want to be careful with them,’ people would tell us, ‘they’re hunters, you know. And once they’re off the lead, they go hunting. Good luck to you on getting them back before they’re exhausted or hungry or both.’

They follow that kind of warning up with some blood-chilling tale.

‘My Podenco still runs away all the time. I’ve got a GPS device on her collar and I can tell where she is, but when I move towards her, she just moves somewhere else. Once, I spent three hours tracking her and then had time to go home, get some food, and return to tempt her back to me with something to eat.’

Well, we got to know Max before we took him. We visited the shelter several times, taking various dogs out for walks to see if we could work out how they’d behave. Of them all, Max was the one who showed no inclination to clear off, never barked, never growled at other dogs, and showed both affection and a good temper. 

So we took him, even though he was nothing like the dog we’d had in mind. Danielle goes for male cats but female dogs (she also goes for male children, which she’s done three times over, but that’s not something that depends on her choice). We also wanted a small Podenco, of the kind that comes around knee-high to us. Max is male. And he comes pretty much to waist height, which means he can stand up to a table or kitchen surface to grab any delicacy we may have carelessly left out.

His size was another reason to call him Max. Not that we’ve adopted the suggestion of renaming Luci ‘Mini’ and Toffee ‘Micro’. That seemed unfair.

The pack greeting a passer-by
That’s Max, Toffee and Luci, not Max, Micro and Mini

Well, Max has continued for the most part mild as ever. He’s enthusiastically joined the pack Luci and Toffee had already formed. So when they go chasing down the garden barking at anyone with the temerity to go walking past the gate, he likes to go with them. And he demonstrates that he too can bark (deep and loud, now that he’s decided to let us hear him, as opposed to the girls’ yaps).

Max in our woods, off the lead

And, most wonderful of all, he’s never run away from us in the woods. We’d planned not to take him off the lead for the first two or three months. But within ten days we felt confident enough to let him loose and, while he certainly likes to go running into the undergrowth, he seems if anything anxious not to get separated from us and reappears quickly each time. Even more quickly if we call him.

Of course, he may shock us yet and disappear for some hours on some future walk. But, so far at least, so good.

Sunbathing with the pack
That’s Luci to the left, Toffee to the right, not Micro and Mini

His rapid assimilation into the household also demonstrates a political principle for me. Many years ago, I was told that ‘if you want to make a man a conservative, give him something to conserve’. It seems to be true of dogs too. Now that Max has regular meals, a pack, and plenty of affection, he’s become possessive and taken to being a little aggressive towards other dogs, growling at them if they get too close to the main source of his contentment, Danielle. ‘She’s mine,’ he’s clearly saying, ‘try to divert any of her affection towards you and you’ll have me to answer to.’ Very menacing, very worrying. Very conservative.

Even so, he remains mostly mild. His biggest failing sadly concerns children. A friend of ours is a professional dog trainer and I think he got Max right: ‘he’s probably never lived with small children before and he sees them as little noisy creatures that run around everywhere. Unfamiliar with all of that, he perceives them as a threat. So he growls.’

Well, that’s all very fine, but we can’t have our dog growling at our grandchildren. By the end of their last visit, he was getting a lot better, accepting treats from their hands. But there’s more training to be done. And we’re going to do it.

Overall, however, we’ve been more than happy during our first month together. I’m looking forward to the future with him. So it’s with pleasure that I say:

‘Happy mensiversary, mostly mild Max!’

What’s a flowerbed for if it’s not for sunbathing?

Dogs, kids and powerful people

The thing about dogs is that they’re often just like kids.

Sometimes it’s their most endearing characteristics that are the most irritating. Take, for instance, Toffee, our apricot toy poodle (she’s called Toffee because she’s toffee-coloured, unlike her older and slightly bigger black companion, called Luci, who is of course Luci-coloured). One of Toffee’s favourite pastimes is to have us throw one of her soft toys across the room so she can scamper over to it, skidding and sliding on the floor, to retrieve it and bring it back to us.

She then sits on the sofa next to us with the toy at her feet. I mean paws. She waits for a while. Then she starts to whimper discreetly. Then the whimper becomes a lot less discreet. Finally, she starts to bark. And, if none of that works, she gets up on her rear paws and scratches my shoulder with her fore-claws.

That’s fore-claws, not four claws. There are actually eight of them.

‘So I’ve got the toy and I’ve got it subdued. Now throw it again.’

They’re painful. Besides, they’re not good for concentration. At least, not on anything else, which I suppose is Toffee’s point. But it’s not helpful if you’re watching, say, one of those incredibly dense Nordic thrillers, where you miss one subtitle and you’re struggling to catch up for the next twenty minutes. Worse still, you may have been distracted at just the moment when one of the 87 characters – that feels like something of a minimum for a Nordic noir – has been introduced, so you spend the next two episodes asking ‘is he the boyfriend of the photographer, then? Or the father of the little boy who went missing from the playground?’

This is the point where I make my error. What I should do is tell Toffee to settle down. 'No, Toffee,’ I should firmly say, ‘that’s enough. No more playing now.’

But what I actually do is throw the toy again.

You see the mistake? By throwing her toy I’m doing exactly what she wanted. I’m rewarding the very behaviour that annoyed me so much. So, naturally, she’ll do it again. To buy myself a few seconds of peace – and it really is a few seconds, because it doesn’t take her long to return with the toy – I’m condeming myself to hours more of the same exasperation.

Well, kids are often just like that.

Though the reason they’re like that is that all humans, adult or child, are like that. Reward a form of behaviour and you encourage its continuation.

Take, for instance, three generations of a family of hereditary Korean autocrats. I suppose the fun to be got from generally oppressing, frequently imprisoning and occasionally torturing your unfortunate subjects doesn’t last too long. So you long for something else. Namely, recognition. You want a seat at the big boys’ table.

Imagine how wonderful it must be for such a man to have a US President, no less, invite him to sit down with him at a conference table. As equals. With the same number of flags for each of them. With great imposing motorcades to get to the venue and back from it. And, on top of all that, to have that same US President saying nice things about him, even declaring what a tough job he has, keeping his people starving and downtrodden, and how well he’s doing it.

And all he has to do to get all that is develop a missile and a nuclear warhead that can hit the United States. To get all that applause and smiling recognition. All the delightful baubles that eluded both his daddy and his granddaddy.

Wow! A Kim like a big boy! A proper politician!

Now, here’s the question: will he, as a result of all this fuss, decide to do away with his nuclear arsenal? Or will he, Toffee-like, just keep right on going, perhaps doing away with a few little bits but keeping enough to make sure that he keeps being glad-handed by the US President?

I leave you to answer that for yourselves.

All this might naturally change when there’s a new president with working neurons. But for now, with his own personal Trump to play with, I can’t see what could possibly stop Kim Jong-un carrying on with the fun.

Just like Toffee keeps on wrapping me around her little finger. Or claw, at least.

Good combinations

Certain pairings just seem to work, don’t they? Fish and chips, for instance. Or spinach and egg. And, of course, gin and tonic.

The same is true, or ought to be, about kids and dogs. It isn’t always. Our dogs, Luci and Toffee, are toy poodles, which means they’re smaller than our cat. He’s a big cat, admittedly, but hey, he’s a cat. The domestic kind. Not a leopard or anything.

Providing my readers with a sense of scale:
Toffee with our cat, Misty

And yet I saw a child – and not the tiniest but a seven or eight-year-old – burst into tears the other day and rush into his dad’s arms when he was approached by Toffee, the smaller of the two. She thinks that kids were only placed on earth for her entertainment. She balances that apparently egotistical view by the belief that her only purpose in life is to entertain kids. So if she sees one she runs joyfully over and tries to leap all over them.

Leading in some case, most strikingly in the one I mentioned, to deplorable results.

So when three kids came rushing up to us in the park today and asked to play with Luci and Toffee, I explained carefully that Luci was timid and wouldn’t want to play, but that Toffee would be only too pleased.

“If you run away from her,” I told them, “she’ll run after you but she’ll never catch you. Basically, she’ll run with you. She won’t bite you but, if you let her, she might lick you to death.”

The joy of being chased by Toffee
Potentially never-ending as she never catches up

To my delight, and even more to theirs (and I’m including Toffee here), these kids were bolder than some, and quicker on the uptake than most. They took off and let Toffee chase them. They screamed a bit, much like the screaming you get on a school playground at break time – with nerves certainly, but with a lot more pleasure mixed in – which only added to the fun.

One of them even worked out a way to persuade Luci to play a little – by chasing her, rather than expecting Luci to do the chasing.

Go about it right and even Luci can be got to play

And, as I warned them, the only real danger with Toffee was being licked to death. A danger heightened when your big brother (I assume that’s what he was) is egging Toffee on.

Toffee being over-affectionate
And is that a failure of sibling protection?

W C Fields may once have said (or it seems it may have been said about him) that, “a man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad”. Oh, well. At least children and dogs can get on just fine if they learn to overcome their fear.

And have a lot more fun with each other than Fields ever gave either.

Luci's diary: water – when it's fun and when it isn't

They left me behind again the other day. Went out for the whole evening. And the worst of it was that, when they got back, number 2 smelled of another dog. Another dog! All over his hands. Like he’d been stroking the ghastly thing. I had to lick his fingers for ages just to get the smell off them. It was quite fun, actually, and by the end his hands smelled right again – that is, they smelled of me.

Talking about smell and getting clean, the humans decide every now and then that I need to smell of something else. So they wash me.

“What gets into them?” I ask Misty the cat, “why do they say I smell? I don’t smell.”

“You do smell,” he says, “you smell of dog.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?” I ask, “what’s a dog supposed to smell of? You wouldn’t want me to smell of cat, would you?”

“I don’t know. Cats smell good. I wouldn’t mind if the whole world smelled of cat. Except for the bits I want to hunt and eat.”

“That’s just silly. You like my smell. That’s why you always want to lie on my blanket. Even when I want to.”

He looked a bit embarrassed then, like I’d caught him out in something he didn’t want to admit to. He just sort of mumbled back at me.

“I just like the feel of the blanket. It’s a good blanket. Nothing to do with you.”

“Anyway,” I went on, “even if I do smell a teensy weeny bit of dog, that’s no reason to clean me is it?”

“I keep telling you. They’re domestics. That’s what they do. Clean things. If you let them. I only let them serve food, but that’s because I’ve shown them who’s boss. You just let them push you around, so you get washed. Serves you right.”

It wasn’t very nice. Hot water and silly soap suds. And it lasted for ever. And left me all wet. So wet that I had to run around and roll everywhere just to get a bit drier. That left the couch quite wet which made it less comfortable to lie. Human number 2 wasn’t pleased.

Me. Wet. Miserable. Getting the couch damp
Why do they keep doing this to me?

“Why’ve you made the couch all wet, you silly dog?” he asked me, all annoyed.

He doesn’t like it when he can’t sit at his end of the couch and play with his dratted computer. It makes him quite irritable. Usually I just give him the sad-eye look and he stops, but this time I was fed up myself, what with being all bedraggled and all that.

“Don’t blame me,” I told him, “it was human number 1 who put me in the bath. Why don’t you get her to stop?”

But it didn’t do any good. He never understands when I talk to him. It’s so sad, isn’t it? They have such limited intelligence, humans.

Talking about water, though, we had a bit of fun when we went to see that other family we visit sometimes and who sometimes visit us. They have the granddaughter, apparently. I don’t understand why they keep her if she’s our granddaughter. We ought to take her home with us so she can play with me a bit more often.

Anyway, near where she lives, there’s this place with loads and loads of water. Believe it or not, it just goes on and on, so you can’t see the end of it. It’s OK, because you can wander in and paddle around a bit in it, and it’s fun: not hot, and it has no soap suds. Tastes odd, though – terribly salty, which makes me feel funny sometimes, but still you can play a lot of games in it – I played that silly game with the humans, where I bring them a stick so they can throw it into the water. They so enjoy that and I think it’s terribly fun to see them with their trouser legs rolled up over their knees…

Only thing I really don’t like about that water is that it’s a bit tricksy. It can be all quiet and flat like, and letting you wander around in it, and then it suddenly gathers itself together in a big lump and throws itself at you. Usually when you’re not watching, so it catches you from behind. Rotten trick. It meant I had to keep an eye on it and sometimes had to belt back to the line to stop it catching me.

Come to think of it, that was quite fun too. Outrunning it, you know. That water, it’s going to have to learn to be bit quicker if it’s going to catch me. At least, when I’m watching out for it.

Loads of water. Fun when it’s behaving itself, like here

When we got back home, Misty was on the couch. At my end. The bit that smells of me. And I couldn’t help noticing that he didn’t have the excuse of lying on my blanket because it wasn’t even there: I’d taken it with me.

It’s the blanket he likes, is it? For the feel, not the smell? Yeah, right. 

I reckon everyone likes my smell, even the humans, who keep rubbing their noses on me.

Which just leaves me wondering: why on earth do we have to keep going through that stupid bath business?

Luci's Diary: I'm getting to like the place.

Luci's Diary. In which she seems to be settling in and learning her way round the new place. And its occupants.

March 2015

Well, I seem to have fallen on my four feet. Or at least my new owners’ four feet. 

Things are OK.

These two both have grey tops. I’ve learned that this means they’re incredibly ancient. That has its plusses and its minuses. Not so good for playing, like the little people in my last family, but a lot easier to get your own way with. In fact, I’ve been told I shouldn’t call them owners. I should think of them as domestics. But they like to boss me around and, hey, since they feed me, and don’t expect me to feed them, I play along with it, doing what they say. 

Some of the time.

One of the first things they did when we got here was take me into the garden. Outside, would you believe. Just big open sky above me. Which anything could come out of. 

Still, it’s got fences round it. I suppose that makes it reasonably safe. Took a while, all the same, before I got comfortable. By yesterday, though, when the sun came out, and it was quite warm, I actually got quite glad to lie in it. Till the woman came out and told me to get off the vegetables. No idea what she meant – it was just a patch of brown earth, but she seemed to think it was important. It was no skin off my snout though, so I got out like she asked.

The man keeps giving me orders too, but he’s got the concentration of a goldfish (well, that’s what I’ve been told, though to be honest I don’t really know what a goldfish is). He tells me to do something, or stop doing something, and then gets buried in one of his books or his laptop computer, so I just get on with whatever I was doing anyway.

Silly thing that laptop, by the way. After all, it takes up his lap. The woman keeps saying I’m a lapdog, which is fine with me, but that means the lap’s mine. Walking on his keyboard, I find, is generally a good way of getting his attention. He gets a bit shirty, but he usually makes me some space.

So, yes, I’m settling in. Though there was a bit of an odd thing during the first few days. I had this growing sense that the three of us weren’t alone in the place. There were odd noises from time to time, and a passing scent that certainly wasn’t either of them. They’d say strange things too.

“He must be out in the garden, sulking.”

“Yes, and coming in at night when there’s no chance of meeting Luci, having a bite to eat, sleeping in the front room and getting out again in the morning.”

Imagine my horror when I was confronted one day, inside the house, by this enormous cat. A gigantic beast. I gave him the bark, of course, and then – I really don’t know what came over me – I dashed at him, instead of hiding behind the sofa like I should have done: he must have outweighed me three or four times over.

To my amazement, he made a beeline for the garden door. And ran straight through it! I’ve not yet worked out how he did that. There was a great clattering sound as he went, and the woman pushed me through the door myself later, telling me I’d soon learn how to do it, but it still beats me. How do you get through a solid door? I don’t mind learning, but she’s going to have to show me again.

Later on I met the same cat in the garden. And my natural caution once more abandoned me, as I went after him, dong some of my best barking. He disappeared over the fence.

But a few hours later he was back in the house. One of the owners was saying “I’ve shut the cat flap,” and this time he didn’t decamp. Instead he tried to hide from me, on one of the chairs under the big table. I was dancing around the chair, jumping up at him, until he reached out one of his paws and gave me such a biff on the nose! It suddenly occurred to me that the rumbling sound he’d been making wasn’t to do with playing, it was him growling. 

Weird. No kind of growl I’d have recognised.

And then an even stranger notion began to grow on me. This wasn’t an intruder – he belonged here. The owners were talking to him, trying to stroke him on the chair he seemed rooted to.

“Now, come on Misty, Luci’s nice. You just need to get to know her. She’s not going anywhere, you know.”

Eventually, he came off the chair, and I decided to treat him with a bit more respect. Especially if he’s here to stay. And all the more so since he packs a heck of a wallop in that paw of his. 

Sometimes he feels like playing. And sometimes he just doesn't

Sometimes he doesn’t mind playing, and that’s fun. But sometimes he’s had enough, and boy, does he let me know it. He makes a funny sort of low howling sound and comes after me, both front paws flailing. I find the best thing to do when that happens is to lie somewhere and look unthreatening. That usually makes him stop.

He can be quite nice, then. It was he who explained that the humans weren’t owners, they were domestics. I’m sure he’s right, but I’m happy to pretend otherwise. He also explained about the man having the concentration of a goldfish, and that you can get away with biting him.

That’s proved useful. Usually the woman gets up in the middle of the night and lets me out for a pee. But if she doesn’t, all I have to do is find the man’s elbow and gnaw on it a bit. That wakes him up quite quickly. And instead of batting me with a paw, like Misty would, he takes me downstairs to let me out.

A good arrangement.

It was Misty who told me about keeping a diary too. He’s had one for ages. Long before I was around.

I think I’ll do the same. This is an interesting place where lots of things happen. More than enough to fill a diary.

Though, quite honestly, I don’t need any more mysterious intrusions into the household. OK with Misty: he’s proved great fun, when he’s in a good mood. But that’s quite enough, thanks. The owners do keep letting other people in, which is a pain – they’re all so big. It makes you wonder what the point is of having walls around the place, and fences round the garden, if you don’t stop strangers wandering inside them.

Still, none of them has stayed long. There’s only the man and the woman and – joy and fun! – Misty. If that’s how things remain, I’ll have nothing to complain about. 

And this diary will be a happy place.

Misty's Diary: a bundle of irritation called Lucy

Another entry from Misty’s diary. In which he has to come to terms with an existential shock.

March 2015

He thinks he’s so damned smart, that domestic number 2. And he’s actually so damned dumb. He may find that out later today.

He was off getting thrashed at some silly sport or another this morning, and then number 1 headed out too, so I was left alone. Again. Not that I’m complaining or anything, just that I think when they go on about my unfriendly behaviour and all that, they ought to think what it’s like being left on my own with no idea how long that’s going to last.

Amazing they whinge about my using claws on them so much.

But when number 2 got back, while I was quietly having my late mid-morning snooze, he decided to disturb me with some incomprehensible rambling. 

“You’d better get ready for a shock, Misty my boy,” he announced. “A big shock.” 

Quietly minding my own business
But what were the domestic staff up to?

He delivered this weird pronouncement with some satisfaction. You can imagine, can’t you? As though he was getting something over me, just for once.

Well, I didn’t say anything. Partly because I can’t see any point letting him know I can speak. It’s bad enough he knows I can write. But in any case, I didn’t want to say the only thing that would make any sense.

“You can’t prepare for a shock, you poor fool, can you? If you could, it wouldn’t be a shock, would it? It’s like checking with a friend whether Thursday night would be convenient for his surprise party. The whole point about shocks is that they take you by surprise. And so there’s no preparing for them, except by just being generally alert, but I’m alert all the time anyway.”

Instead, I just gave him my look. You know, the baleful one. Should leave him withering on the floor, but it never does: you can’t imagine how weak on sensitivity he is.

But then, when number 1 got in at last, I realised what he’d been on about. A shock? This was nothing short of majorly infuriating.

She’s foisted on me… this… this smelly, runny-aroundy bundle of fluff. A… a… well, I can’t think of any other way of putting it. An animal of the canine persuasion. A bloody dog.

Now I can imagine people might say to me, “well, you liked Janka, didn’t you?”

First of all, I didn’t like Janka. I just got used to having her around. I thought it would make her feel better if from time to time I walked round her, rubbing myself against her, and purring. Even if her response when I did that was to stand rooted to the spot looking, poor clumsy oaf that she was, a smidgeon uncomfortable. I knew that at heart it mattered to her that she should feel appreciated by the boss, so I’d give her a little appreciation from time to time.

I was used to Janka. A companion, not a dog

And I’ll admit it left a bit of a Janka-shaped hole in our lives when she decided to clear off and not come back. Without a word of goodbye or anything. Just there in the morning, gone in the evening.

So if Domestic number 1 brought Janka home again, I’d not complain. I was used to her. I’d be happy to see her back again.

But, and I can’t stress this too much, she wasn’t a dog. She might have smelled like a dog, and barked like a dog, and behaved a bit goofily like a dog, but that didn’t mean she was a dog, it meant she was Janka.

This new arrival? This thing that’s just been dumped on me? They call her Lucy to make it sound like she has a personality, but in reality she’s just all dog, through and through. The little variety, I think, a puppy, but honestly, I can’t really tell one dog from another. Either way, she means I have a chore ahead I wasn’t planning for.

Interloper. Imposition. In my house.
The so-called Lucy

I’ve got to start out on my training work all over again. Breaking her spirit. Cowing her pride. Cutting the crap, basically, sorry for the language.

Hard work, and not what I want to start off on at my time of life.

What an imposition. They really have no idea. I think I’ll pop out. You never know, if I stay out long enough, things may be back to normal when I get back in.

And if they’re not, then it’ll be time for Domestic Number 2’s lesson.

Misty's diary: dogs? Just plain dumb

Delighted to say that I’ve found our cat Misty’s diary again. The extract below seemed worth sharing. Here it is for your edification.



Mid-January 2014

It sometimes seems to me that dogs are on earth to make blackbirds look smart. And, let me tell you, blackbirds are dumb, dumb, dumb. I can vouch for that from bitter experience. Theirs, not mine.

In passing, I think blackbirds must have heard someone say that the early bird catches the worm, because they always seem to be in the garden looking for them. No accounting for tastes. Not that I find their taste objectionable: I rather enjoy it, on those frequent occasions when, whatever they may be looking for, what they find is me.

They haven’t cottoned on to the idea that the garden’s mine. Dumb, like I said. I mean, the whole neighbourhood must know. I had the devil’s own job making sure the local cats all understood when I first moved in. The row was spectacular. The domestic staff sleeps in the bedroom overlooking the garden, and even they complained about the volume at which I explained to feline interlopers that their territory stopped at my fence. Eventually they got the message and kept clear. That even applied to the one they call Napoleon.

Funnily enough, I like Napoleon. Always had a bit of a soft spot for black cats. But I couldn’t have him treating my garden as his own, so I made sure he realised he’d met his Waterloo. These days he recognises my jurisdiction over my land. Which is more than the blackbirds have grasped.

Now our dog Janka’s pretty much at their level. Likeable enough, sure, and I’ll rub against her from time to time, in a friendly sort of way. I even like her smell, oddly enough, so I enjoy taking a nap on her mat. Not that she appreciates the compliment – she always seems worried when I take it over, even though I leave her quite a bit of the edge.

Doing my mate a favour by sharing her mat

But though I like her, I can’t deny she’s – frankly – intellectually challenged. Take the racket she makes. Bark, bark, bark. Whine, whine, whine. No bloody use to anyone. She’s only ever interested in food, and I’ve tried to explain how to set about getting it. Pick a domestic, rub against a leg, and purr for God’s sake. It’s not that difficult.

It doesn’t work so well with the chief domestic. She thinks it’s affection and strokes me. Which is fine, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. But a stroke’s only so good, whereas a brimming bowl of kibble fills the belly a treat.

So I tend to go for her sidekick. I’ve bitten and scratched him enough for him to realise that affection isn’t anything I dole out in more than small doses. In his case, homeopathic ones. He’s got enough brainpower to get a message, as long as I’ve underlined it with tooth and claw, so when I purr at him, he knows to check my bowl.

Funnily enough, it isn’t always empty, but he always refills it anyway. Which suits me fine. They keep my food up high, so it’s out of reach of the barking vacuum cleaner. Good plan. But it does mean I have to jump up to take a look at the bowl. It’s an effort. I don’t mind if the bowl turns out to be full, but what if it’s empty? I’m an athlete, I believe in economy of effort, and a jump for an empty bowl isn’t it.

So I purr at the sidekick, and he fills up the bowl whether it needs it or not. Pavlovian, his reaction. Stronger than him. Hear purring. Collect bowl. Tip contents into tin. Refill. Replace.

What’s not to like in that arrangement?

But Janka just won’t learn to purr. Hopeless. No aptitude for languages.

Instead, she’s forced to resort to subterfuge. Or what she thinks is subterfuge. ‘Janka, Janka, old girl,’ I want to say, ‘you just don’t have the wit for it.’

The other day she waited till he’d gone into the kitchen leaving the sugar bowl on the dining table. Up she jumped for it.

Not, by the way, a clean jump like I’d have made. Oh, no. Onto a chair which slid across the floor. From there onto the table, forcing the chair to slide still further. Lots of clatter and scraping and banging. Then she homed in on the sugar.

But by then, alerted by all the racket, he was back out.

‘Janka! Bad girl! Off the table.’

I’d have purred and looked innocent. She just turned tail and leapt. For the chair which was far too far away by then. Hit it. Felt it slip out of her reach. And crashed down to the floor. Painfully, I expect. And think of the indignity! You wouldn’t catch me doing that.

Dumb, poor thing. But then that’s dogs for you. When it comes to catching food, my money’s on a cat any time.

Which reminds me. I wonder if there’s an early blackbird out in my garden now, trying to catch a worm?

I think I’ll go and check.

The right note for the New Year

W C Fields told us that ‘anyone who hates dogs and kids can’t be all bad.’ He clearly knew nothing about how very useful they can be in making friendships.

It’s amazing the people you meet through your kids. You can get to know some pretty remarkable individuals at the school gates. And the kids themselves can make some charming friends.

When my sons were at school, they brought home a great many friends. With sometimes painful frequency. In fact, one of the great mysteries of those times was just why it was always the friends who came round to our place, never our sons who went to theirs. An image I shall never forget is that of a brat of a lad, today a charming young adult, waltzing into the kitchen where I was sitting, ignoring me completely and going through our fridge choosing what he felt would make him a suitable (and copious) meal. Later I asked my son ‘why can’t you go around to his place and eat their food from time to time?’, but I never got an answer.

Dogs too are an excellent means to make friends with people. You meet them in the parks walking their owners. The dog's breed is often an excellent starting point for a conversation. In fact, given the characteristics of some of those breeds, you occasionally have to start with a discussion about species.

One person we met through such park expeditions with our respective dogs was our good friend Natasha. She’s Russian though she lives in Strasbourg, as we did at the time.

I hasten to add that Strasbourg is in France: I’m fascinated by the number of people who think that it’s in Germany. One of the issues over which three wars were fought in the space of 75 years was who would own Strasbourg. Please bear in mind that the last of those conflicts, the Second World War, ended in a narrow victory of the Allies over Germany. This should help answer the question ‘is Strasbourg in Germany or France these days?’

One of the saddest aspects of France is its terrifying formality about qualifications and age in the job market. It’s the only country I know where you can study for a diploma in selling pharmaceuticals. Not selling, mind; specifically selling pharmaceuticals.

At the end of the course of study, you’re qualified to sell drugs and nothing else; fail to get a job in that field, and you’re in trouble. Of course, get a job selling the wrong kind of drugs and you may end up in trouble too, but that’s not because of the qualification.

Natasha had been suffering terrible problems finding a job in France. She had reached an age where prospective employers looked on her CV askance, if they looked at it at all. She kept putting a brave face on things, but she was obviously beginning to get depressed.

On one occasion when they met while walking their dogs in the park, my wife Danielle said to her ‘my husband needs bright staff. Why don’t you get a job with him?’

What I needed was a programmer skilled in working with the SQL-Server relational database technology, and Natasha had never heard of SQL-Server. On the other hand, she was intelligent and a qualified mathematician, from the country which had produced most of the best mathematicians around the world for some decades. Given her lack of specific experience, we couldn’t really offer a good salary, but we could at least give her a job on financially miserable terms. That’s an admission I make with nothing but shame, but I feel that at least the arrangement was a lot better than being unemployed, as she would I’m sure be the first to agree.

She didn’t let us down. She taught herself SQL-Server from first principles, rather as though she was setting out to solve an equation that at first looked intractable but in the event turned out to be far too simple for her. Within a couple of years, she was a star whose lustre attracted a company based in Switerland with whom we happened to be working.

One day she came to see me, obviously uncomfortable and embarrassed.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked her.

‘They’ve offered me a job,’ she told me, ‘and I feel terrible about it. Should I refuse?’

‘How much are they proposing to pay you?’

‘Well, I refused to name a figure so they came up with one.’

She told me their offer. It was twice as much as we were paying her.

I collapsed in laughter at her discomfiture.

‘A 100% increase? And you’re asking me whether you should refuse it?’ I seized her hand and pumped it up and down. ‘Congratulations. Grasp the chance.’

‘But we’re friends...’

‘And so we’ll continue to be. We don’t work for friendship, we work for money, and this is a hell of a sight more than we could offer you. You just have to take it.’

So she went off to the Swiss company, earning a proper salary at last.

At first things went well, though she had to travel to Switzerland rather a lot (many hours away by train). But she’s tough and professional and coped with the stress, and continued to shine. Then, however, the recession hit. Her employers started to make people redundant.

They couldn’t quite bring themselves to let Natasha go. She was too obviously competent, too liked by customers. Instead they just started making small changes that made things increasingly uncomfortable for her: they cut her down to four days work a week, they told her that she would no longer be able to work from Strasbourg but would have to be based at the Swiss office, they kept failing to finalise and send her the contract with the new terms.

In the end, Natasha decided she’d had enough. It was time to look for another job. Even then, in her characteristic way, she took her time and organised things methodically. She built her CV, prepared an application letter, started making lists of advertised jobs for which she might apply, and of companies to approach in case they had a position even though they hadn’t advertised one.

Finally, she was ready. She thought she’d give her approach a trial run. One Sunday morning a couple of months ago, she sent off her CV with a covering letter to one of the companies she’d identified.

‘I felt it was worth giving it a try,’ she told me later, ‘I thought it would be great to get an interview, just for the practice.’

An e-mail turned up from the Managing Director of the company during the afternoon of that same Sunday. She rang.

‘Can you come in to Paris tomorrow?’

If she was after interview practice, she got more than she’d bargained for. After a long and wide-ranging discussion, the MD asked her if she minded meeting the Development Director. Further detailed conversation took place. By the end of their time together, they were asking her to start work the following Monday. Of course, she couldn’t – even with the high-speed trains, Paris and Strasbourg are two and a quarter hours apart, and Natasha has a family (and a dog). But they found a compromise, and she’s been working in the new post for two or three weeks now. It’s early days and far too soon to reach a definitive conclusion, but so far it’s worked out pretty well.

A good story to end one year on, I felt, and start the next in a spirit of hope.

And it all started with a chance meeting between dog-owners walking their pets.

Time to review W C Fields' view. Anyone who thinks dogs and kids do no-one any good can’t be all that well informed.

Happy New Year to you all - what am I saying? - to us all