Bridge in a trumped-up world

Danielle and I like playing bridge.

Apart from the enjoyment of the game, I just like its name. We live in a world that needs bridges. Sadly, we seem instead to be building walls, the most dismal being the one along the US-Mexico border, whose only redeeming feature is that it doesn’t exist and probably never will.

But as well as the name, I like the way bridge classifies the four suits of the deck of cards it uses.

Two suits are referred to as ‘majors’. They’re hearts and spades. That seems to celebrate two of the more positive aspects of human existence, affection and hard work (please don’t write to tell me that this isn’t the derivation of ‘spades’ – I know and it’s of no importance – the word is spades and spades are for digging, and that’s all that matters to me).

On the other hand, the minors, inferior to the other two, are diamonds and clubs. A certain type of precious stone may or may not be a girl’s best friend but is certainly, and above all, an ostentatious display of wealth. Similarly, a club may well provide an opportunity for entertainment (perhaps even by playing bridge), but also and very often acts to separate out a self-appointed elite from the excluded masses.

Love and work preferred over wealth and elitism? My kind of values.

Greater, of course, than any of the suits is the fifth bridge option, known as No Trumps. It’s hard to imagine what could be more appropriate, given what looks like the probable outcome of the US election in November.

No Trump: something to pray for. Whether or not you’re a bridge player.

Max: highs and lows and a big step forward

Max in our woods

The 21st of June 2004. The day of the year when we got most light. But a day of highs and lows, for us, but above all for Max. 

The low for him is that he spent most of it under the care of a vet, who anaesthetised him and cut out a growth from his lip. That was one of the two events of the day that Max certainly knew about, at least until the anaesthetic knocked him out. What he didn’t know about, but might have given him a compensating high, was that a representative of the dog shelter where we met him was at the vet’s too. She had the papers we needed to sign to move Max from his existing status, in foster care with us, to full adoption. 

We signed. The deed was done. Max had adopted us.

As it happens, if he’d been aware of it, I’m not sure whether he would have regarded it as anything like as momentous as we did.

‘So what’s changed exactly?’ he might have asked.

After all, he knew, and had known for a while, that he lived with us. That we and the house we amusingly persist in regarding as ours, now formed his household. He didn’t need anyone’s signature on a dotted line to confirm what to him must have seemed obvious.

Humans, though, are more complicated. We need bits of paper. We need other people to confirm things that anybody sensible, like a previously abandoned dog only too relieved to have a house to live in at last, views as a done deal.

To be fair, there had been a few issues that we at least, if not Max, needed to clear up during the fostering period.

He had been known to growl at our grandkids. Now, I’m not beyond growling at them myself, especially at 3:00 in the morning, but it’s unlikely that I would ever bite them. Was the same true of Max? We couldn’t really share a house with a dog that might harm the children.

Well, I’m glad to say that during their most recent visits, relations between the grandkids and Max have improved immeasurably. In fact, while our grandson Elliott was with us the week before last, he became quite a fan of feeding Max treats. Max returned the favour, naturally becoming rather a fan of Elliott in his role as treat purveyor. As I recorded previously, Max had probably had little or no contact with kids earlier and that made him wary of them. He seemed to have overcome such fears now, and to have adapted, at least to those two.

In one area there’d been a slightly worrying development, but one we think we can deal with. As he has become increasingly integrated into the household, he has learned from the girls – Luci and Toffee, the two toy poodles – that it’s the dogs’ duty to guard the house. There are people who have the gall to go walking casually past the end of our back or front garden, sometimes even taking their impudence to the point of having dogs – other dogs, not properly cleared or authorised to approach the premises – with them. The answer is naturally to run down to one or other gate and bark at them and, as I mentioned last time, Max has become good at that.

Unfortunately, he’s gone still further. He tends to be less well-disposed towards men than women, possibly because the person who abandoned him was likely to be a hunter (the podenco breed is the classic Spanish hunting dog) and probably a man. When a workman visited us some time ago, and Max couldn’t stop him coming in by barking at him, he bit him instead. Nothing too damaging, and the victim took it in good part, though he admitted it had hurt. We’re taking more care now to keep Max away from anyone he might not take to well, since it’s not something we want to see happen again.

Overall, though, we felt there was no insuperable obstacle to the adoption and so Danielle signed.

The worst moment for Max at the vet’s must have been when Danielle left him there. The poor chap knows what abandonment feels like. Why, the shelter had picked him up from a roadside, where he’d maintained his existence for an uncertain time by foraging for whatever food he could find. He’d learned the difference between surviving and living. Danielle stayed with him until the anaesthetic knocked him out, but waking up, surrounded by strangers in a strange place, must have been a dismal experience that woke some less than pleasant memories. 

I’m not sure he altogether forgave us at first. It may have been just the after-effects of the anaesthetic, but it seemed to me that when we got him home, there was something of an unspoken reproach about him. Something which, had he expressed it in words, might have taken the form, ‘you left me behind. Don’t you know how painful that is for someone who’s already known abandonment? Besides, I woke up with this bloody pain in my lip. What on earth did you have those guys do to me while I was out and unable to defend myself?’

Yep. Couches are a good thing. And this one’s mine

Still, it didn’t last. Quite quickly he settled back into his life. Another change during the fostering period was that, where before he seemed reluctant to clamber onto a couch, perhaps because he’d never lived indoors and didn’t know what they were for, these days he’s fine with them. Indeed, he’s taken over one of our couches, to the point where for a while he insisted on its exclusive use and simply wouldn’t get up on it if anyone else was there. These days, he might even consent to letting one of the family, or one of Luci and Toffee, up onto it with him, but still won’t share it with other visitors.

OK, OK, Luci can come too. So long as she behaves

Anyway, it was good to see him on his couch and relaxing once more, the mood of hurt and disappointment apparently dissipating.

And then, of course, there was the evening walk. Max is a dog who springs to his feet and rushes over if he hears us so much as approaching the door. Getting out into the woods was a return to delight for him. I should say, in passing, that he’s great on walks and our fears that he might suddenly reveal the common podenco custom of disappearing and failing to return for hours, haven’t been realised. 

The walk went well. Max enjoyed himself. He even revealed his imperturbability by simply ignoring a magpie that attacked him.

Max ignoring an aerial attack

Why did the bird attack? Well, the magpies have their fledgelings at the moment and, like their close cousins the crows, the magpies have young that leave (or possibly fall from) the nest before they can fly. For two or three days they need to be protected from potential predators, a category to which they have clearly decided that Max belongs.

So it was fun to see him being not just admonished – with loud cawing – but actually buzzed by a flying magpie while we were out. And equally fun to see how he completely ignored it. He had things to smell, bushes to explore, and he wasn’t going to be disturbed by a tiresome bird.

Back to normal, then. And now as a full member of the household. Something for him to take for granted and for us to celebrate.

Which we did with a glass or two that evening.

Now I’ve adopted you,
the least you can do is stroke me when I ask

Best granddad. Or the worst

The best Granddad in the world opens the door
for Elliott to make all sorts of new acquaintances

‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’, wrote the American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. To him, it didn’t matter whether you always held the same beliefs, only that whatever you believed, you endorsed it forcefully and upheld it energetically at the time you believed it. ‘Speak what you think now in hard words,’ he urged, ‘and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day’.

Well, it seems that at the tender age of three, our grandson Elliott, who has just spent four days with us without his parents or sister, is a convinced Emersonian. Indeed, I suppose a purist among logicians might go so far as to claim that he falls into a fallacy, the excluded middle. 

It seems that I am either the best granddad in the world, or the worst, but never any of the little dull things in between.

The visit started well. There was the ice cream in the centre of the village of La Cañada, to which our street belongs (I like to think of the shops in the centre as ‘downtown’ and, since the pocket handkerchief of a square with the ice cream shop has the same name as Madrid’s great Puerta del Sol, clearly the village authorities feel the same).

Joy is an ice cream

Later there was the opportunity to make the most of the cherry season.

Or a bowl of cherries

We also went several times to the swimming pool. It’s not ours alone. We share it with fifteen other households, but that’s not many and we often have it to ourselves. 

It took a little while for Elliott to get his confidence back, after a year without swimming. We spent our time mostly in the kids’ area, which is reassuringly shallow. But we were able to get some good games going, when the best granddad in the world (definitely!) swung him around in circles with his feet in the water or supported him while he doggy-paddled around. The best was when he came and sat on my lap while I sat on the bottom of the pool. That meant I could move around with him in that safe position, to the delight of us both.

Enjoying the kids’ pool with Granddad

But, sadly, things turned much less satisfying that evening. He and I went to Burger King, usually a moment of supreme pleasure for him. But, maybe because he’d been to the swimming pool twice that day, he was tired. He barely touched his food, announcing that he no longer liked nuggets, an astonishing declaration from someone who had always previously been a great fan of them. Then, while waiting for his dessert, he headed back to the play area, something he loves taking advantage of while at Burger King. This time, however, though he dutifully removed his shoes, as specified in the instructions, instead of climbing up to the top of the construction in order to slide back down from floor to floor as he usually does, he just lay on the ground without moving.

Eventually, his dessert was ready. It was ice cream with caramel sauce on it, which should have been received with enthusiasm. Sadly, it had been served with a spoon stuck upright in it. 

‘You’ve tasted it!’ Elliott challenged me and started to cry.

‘I haven’t,’ I assured him, with perfect truth.

‘You have, you have,’ he repeated, tears now running freely, ‘I don’t want it.’

He pushed it away.

No amount of reasoning on my part could convince him to eat it, so I started preparing everything to leave. But, rather than throw out his ice cream, now melting away, I quickly ate it myself. After all, he clearly wasn’t going to. On the other hand, with hindsight, it occurred to me that it wasn’t a move liable to make my protestations of innocence – true though they were – any more believable.

I’d undoubtedly become the world’s worst granddad.

Just before things turned dismal:
this playground, as well as rides, has rocks, water, fish and turtles

Nor was what I think of as the Burger King Incident the low point of the visit. That came the following day. We went to a favourite playground of his, by bike, him in the kid seat behind me. Everything went fine until we were a couple of minutes from home. There’s a downhill stretch there so I was going fairly quickly. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think I hit a bit of a shallow pothole, causing the front wheel to rise off the ground and, when it came down on loose stones, to slide away from me, bringing us both crashing down.

Poor Elliott. He had a terrible shock and wailed to show it. Fortunately, and this was confirmed by a paediatrician later, he had no worse injury than a nasty graze on his arm. With the help of several people who came rushing over to our assistance and assured him he had nothing seriously wrong, it was easy, courageous boy that he is, to calm him down quickly. He stopped crying though I don’t think his view of his granddad improved at all.

Meanwhile, my left leg and arm were covered in blood. I took a look at the knee and thought, ‘oh Lord! That could need stitches’. A neighbour tried to patch me up with steri-strips but she was convinced, and convinced me, that I needed to go and see a nurse. The nurse re-did the patching but told me I just had to go to hospital. As I feared, that meant spending five hours in an emergency department waiting for treatment which, in the end, involved six stiches.

The only good side to all this is that we had, I felt, reached rock bottom. The only way forward now was up. Or so I hoped. And it turned out my hope was justified.

I took Elliott out for another bike ride the next day, but of a very different kind. He was on his own bike and, since it’s a little big for him, I trotted along behind him holding his shoulder so he didn’t fall. That was a far more satisfactory experience.

I asked that afternoon who the best granddad in the world was.

‘You,’ he said.

One way of looking at that is to see it as Emersonian non-consistency. However, I like to think it’s more a matter of not holding a grudge. And in my view, that’s a really good character trait.

By then, I wasn’t feeling too well, so I retreated to bed. But Danielle tells me that when she dropped him off with his dad at the station in Valencia, Elliott told him, ‘I wish I hadn’t gone on that bike ride’. 

That’s amazingly mature for a three-year-old. It’s also entirely legitimate. I share the sentiment and also wish we hadn’t gone on that bike ride.

All I can say is, ‘don’t worry Elliott, or Matilda, that’s the last time granddad goes out on a bike with a child behind him. I can live with the chance of injuring myself, but never again want to put either grandchild at risk.’

Something I’m sure Sheena and Nicky, their parents, will be relieved to know.

 

Grandparenting at a joint birthday party

Talk about a gift that keeps giving. 

Our grandson Elliott showed extraordinary time management skills in arranging to be born on Danielle’s birthday. That’s Danielle his grandmother. That, of course, means that we get a great combined celebration each year.

Joint birthday. From left to right:
birthday boy, birthday girl, un-birthday girl

This year was special in that Danielle’s was a birthday with a 0 at the end. The 7 at the beginning may have been even more significant, but we focused on celebrating the zero.

As for Elliott, he turned three.

One of the key preparatory tasks was to purchase suitable presents. And I really mean presents, in the plural. It was Elliott’s birthday, but we weren’t going to let his sister Matilda sit by and watch him enjoying gifts while she got nothing. 

In any case, it meant we were applying the reasoning of that fine logician Lewis Carrol. You may remember that he argues convincingly, or at least has Humpty Dumpty argue convincingly in Through the Looking Glass, that since there are more un-birthdays than birthdays each year, it’s much better to get un-birthday presents.

Humpty Dumpty’s incontrovertible logic:
Most years contain 364 more un-birthdays than birthdays

For once, I took the initiative in selecting Elliott’s presents. We ended up with two. One was a rather amusing toy truck, quite large and made of plastic, with lots of little compartments with transparent doors, behind each of which was a much smaller model, also of plastic, of different vehicles – cars, trucks, tractors, you name it. It was, of course, ludicrously unrealistic – the difference in scale between the truck outside and the vehicles inside had nothing to with the actual world. Even so, it struck me as fun, which made up for what in my view is the downside of plastic – it may be versatile but it has a flimsiness about it, a sense that it’ll never last, that leaves me feeling it’s just a tad second rate.

Metal, of course, is far better, a feeling which guided the selection of the second present. It was a large, chunky bulldozer toy, heavy, strong, with all the nobility that solid steel gives things. That in my view made the plastic surrealistic toy far less attractive, greater versatility or not.

Wow! This is amazing

Well, you know just where this is leading, don’t you? Yep. He couldn’t get enough of the plastic truck. He had tremendous pleasure taking all the little vehicles out, laying them out in a line or a circle or just bunched up together on the floor. Then, to my amazement, he had apparently pretty much equal pleasure, putting them all back. 

See how amazing it is?

As a kid, I had just as much pleasure taking things out of the place where they went when we’d finished with them. Putting them back? Not so much.

The superior metal bulldozer toy? He looked at it. He pushed it a bit. And then he went looking for his fun plastic truck.

And what did we get Matilda?

We got her an aid to communication with her brother, in the form of a pair of walkie-talkies. It turns out that it was more of a hindrance to communication than an aid, because in the age of the mobile phone, neither found it easy to adapt to the notion that you needed to push a button to speak and release it to listen. Something of a metaphor for life, I feel, since I think most of us would prefer to keep the button pressed permanently so we can just keep on talking and ignore what anyone else might want to say. I can’t remember who said that he liked having other people talking, because it gave him the time to decide what he was going to say next. He had insight. Or at least honesty.

This phone is weird. Just how does it work?

Of course, no birthday is complete without a party. The problem for Elliott is that he doesn’t live with us in Valencia so there weren’t many friends near here to invite. It didn’t matter though: he joined a friend in Hoyo de Manzanares, where he lives when not with us, for a joint celebration among kids, and he didn’t seem to mind that at our place, it was all adults. We had an excellent paella cooked superbly by a fine local restaurant and cakes from our excellent bakery, generously provided by Elliott’s parents. They do a fantastic range of mousse cakes, with prices to match, and we had a one with strawberry (as required by Elliott) and another with pistachio (which we’d decided was Danielle’s favourite).

Cake time, with Oana and Sheena
as well as the birthday and unbirthday people

The whole was washed down with several good wines and the animated company of a small group of friends invited by Danielle. That included our great friend Oana who, as I explained last time, originally turned up a week early, which earned her an unplanned paella, and then turned up again on the right day, to help us consume a planned one.

Uncle David accompanying Matilda with Toffee
See David’s camera? The good photos here are by him

Along with the friends, most of the clan gathered too: Matilda and Elliott’s parents, our son Nicky and daughter-in-law Sheena, as well as David and Michael, our other two sons, uncles of the grandkids. 

Uncle Michael with Elliott

An excellent birthday or un-birthday, for grandmother, grandson and granddaughter.

Birthdays are fun but can be exhausing
Sheena with Matilda, Nicky with Toffee

PS What was Danielle’s gift? She wanted clothes and we certainly weren’t going to choose them for her. So we decided we’d club together to get a gift token from the big department store in Spain – the Corte Inglés, since you ask – but then David came up with the wizard scheme of giving her the kind of gift token you can use in any shop you choose. That’s cash. Which we provided. In a nice card, of course.

PPS Last time the grandkids were here we were concerned because Max, our new (though not young) dog, of the classic Spanish race, the podenco, hadn’t got on with them. He’d even growled at them. So it was a delight to see them getting on far better this time – he’s more confident about living with us and has got used to them, so seems not to regard them as a threat any more.

You can imagine the relief…

Matilda getting on fine with Max
if finding it a little difficult to get him to do as she wants

Happy birthday, happy mistake

Not all mistakes are bad.

That was something I learned from a documentary I watched years ago, which introduced me to two people who struck me as highly likeable. 

They were Japanese mathematicians who started their careers in the years after World War II, not a good time for anyone Japanese to be looking for recognition on the world stage. Memories of all that bloodletting were simply too fresh. These two, though, did some maths that was so striking that whatever the reputation of their country, they couldn’t help but win an enviable one for themselves.

The one interviewed for the documentary was Goro Shimura. He was by then a highly respected mathematician working in the intellectual powerhouse that is the Instituted of Advanced Studies at Princeton University in the States (the place once graced by no less a person than Albert Einstein). He was talking about his friend and collaborator in maths, Yutaka Taniyama. You could feel his grief in talking about Taniyama who committed suicide in 1958, something which clearly still saddened Shimura several decades on. 

In the interview, what he said of his him was curiously revealing, touching and, I’d say, uplifting:

Taniyama was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes, but he made mistakes in a good direction. So eventually he got right answers, and I tried to imitate him but I found out, it is very difficult to make good mistakes.

Well, I agree that it isn’t easy to make good mistakes. Which is why I want to pay tribute to a good friend of ours, Oana. She regularly comes for walks with us along the sea or in the hills around here in the Valencian community in Spain. It’s good, however, to do other things with friends than just go on walks with them, and Danielle invited her, for a change, to join us in the joint celebration of her birthday (Danielle’s) that neatly falls on the same day as our grandson Elliott’s. He was turning three, but Danielle a little more.

The latest in our series of walks was a couple of weeks before the birthday, and Oana had been on it with us (it took us along the remains of an extraordinary Roman aqueduct cut through solid rock and, at one point, leaping a gorge on the back of a bridge – well worth the visit). As we parted company at the end of the day, Oana said, ‘see you next week, then’.

That worried me, so in the car home I asked Danielle what she thought.

‘Oana has got the date of the birthday right, hasn’t she? I mean, she said “see you next week” though it’s not till the week after.’

‘Oh, yes, she has the date,’ Danielle reassured me, ‘I sent her all the details.’

The following Saturday, we were invited to the house of another friend, Celia, for a paella. Home-made, and home-made is always the best. It was excellent.

We were chatting over a few drinks before lunch when my phone rang. It was Oana. I answered in some trepidation, fully justified as it turned out.

‘I’m at the gate,’ she told me, ‘I rang the bell and I can hear the dogs, but maybe you didn’t hear it.’

‘At our house?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Just waiting for you to let me in.’

An error had been made. One worthy of a Taniyama. But fortunately it turned out to be just as inspired as one of his. 

‘Tell her to come here,’ said Celia.

‘Oh, no, I can’t do that,’ Oana replied, when I’d passed that on to her.

‘Of course you can,’ I assured her, ‘these are great people, you’ll enjoy meeting them, they’ll enjoy meeting you, and we’ll all have a better time for your being here.’

It took a couple more exchanges to persuade her but, eventually, she let me talk her into coming over.

And it was as I’d said. She enjoyed herself and everybody else enjoyed meeting her. The food was excellent and the conversation joyful.

What more could one want?

Oana enjoying the birthday(s), with Danielle

As for the following week, Oana joined us for the joint birthday. A happy birthday following a happy mistake. Enjoyed by Elliott. Enjoyed by Danielle. Enjoyed by everyone who was there. Elliott successfully turned three. Danielle successfully turned somewhat more.

Elliott successfully turning three

So what had happened to Oana a week earlier was, in fact, the best kind of mistake. A real Taniyama. Much to everyone’s satisfaction.

Easter grandparenting

With the grandkids due to visit us again at the weekend, my mind naturally wanders back to Easter, when they were with us last.

Easter! School was out, giving the grandkids a perfect opportunity to visit us in Valencia where, as they run no risk of forgetting, ice cream gets served daily. And to have all the fun that Easter itself provides.

Part of the fun of an Easter visit...
Escher painted hands. So why shouldn’t Elliott paint his?

Easter, as we all know, is the feast of chocolate, with some egginess, bunniness and lambiness thrown in. Just like Halloween has nothing to do with the eve of All Saints Day, but everything to do with pumpkins along with whimsical and only slightly sinister costumes. Or Christmas has nothing to do with the arrival on earth of the prince of peace and redeemer of mankind and everything to do with a large jovial fellow in a big white beard and a red suit, travelling by flying sleigh drawn by reindeers and bringing – the best bit! – gifts, gifts, gifts.

There are those, the more purist among us, who haven’t quite got the Easter message. They think it’s to do with the death and resurrection of the son of God, gaining the redemption of mankind by his own sacrifice. Well, this is a slightly odd view, as the French philosopher Diderot pointed out, since God ordained the suffering of mankind (you know, after that nasty business with the apple in the Garden of Eden) and Christ is himself God, so what we’re being asked to believe is that God sent himself to earth to suffer and die to save mankind from the punishment he had himself decreed for it.

Anyway, to settle all doubts in the matter, I’m glad to say that I have here the very passage from scripture that justifies the much more widespread interpretation of Easter. I confess that it doesn’t figure in any of the four gospels and, indeed, it’s a little obscure where exactly in holy writing it appears, but please read it and I’m sure you’ll agree with me in attributing the appropriate authority to it:

And thus spake he, ‘go forth and discover one of the bunny kind, and let him travel wide and far among the woods, and there find secret places where chocolate may be left so that only they who are diligent will find it, and that chocolate shall have forms various and diverse, as of eggs, but also of creatures of the woodland or the farm, as perhaps other bunnies or hens or lambs, and with them shall be concealed also forms of creatures long gone that are of the kind known as dinosaurs, but these shall be made of plastic’. 

Well, we took the grandkids into the woods and, lo and behold, hidden in the trees, they found various chocolate items, in the form mostly of eggs but also of bunnies or hens and, wonder of wonders, in an eery coincidence given the scripture I’ve just quoted, dinosaur toys made of plastic. I will admit that they had a little guidance in their quest. When my son, their father Nicky, and I showed up with them, Sheena their mother and Danielle their grandmother were already there and they provided helpful hints to direct the kids’ attention to the places most likely to contain anything worth finding.

Look what we’ve found...

The kids had a great time and, thanks to some strict rationing applied by Danielle and Sheena, sickness was avoided.

I’m glad to say that dinosaurs were not the only members of the animal kingdom that Matilda and Elliott met while they were with us. Nor were all those creatures made of plastic. They had a fine session with living animals of the equine kind (sitting on them) and one of the canine persuasion (to be handled with care).

The horses (well, ponies) provided them with what was in fact their second outing as riders. We’re now looking at where to sign them up for something a little more sustained in the way of training when they’re with us for a slightly longer time and can take advantage of it. But in the meantime, even if all they were doing was having a bit of a wander around on ponies being led by a kind and pleasant pair of instructors, they enjoyed themselves enormously.

Even better than plastic dinosaurs

As for the dog, this was the occasion they first met Max, our latest addition to the household, as I’ve described before. That was just a tad more fraught. Max, a recent recruit from a shelter for rescued dogs is a podenco, the classic Spanish breed, much prized by hunters, but only for a season or so, until they decide they’re no use, or no use any more, and abandon them somewhere by a roadside far from home. 

During such an existence, the dogs don’t get much exposure to kids. So when poor old Max met these two little bundles of speed and – how shall I put this? – un-quietness is perhaps the most tactful term, he had no idea what to make of them. He decided, as most animals do faced with something unfamiliar, that they might well be a threat. So he growled and even made a less than friendly move towards them. That’s not to say that he did anything that caused any harm, just that he suggested he might.

So there’s some training to be done. Though I don’t want to leave you the impression that the first encounter was all bad. There was joy too, especially over walking him, which Matilda and Elliott did together. 

Walking the new dog

Much to his pleasure and theirs.

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?