A Vision of Hellhounds
Daisy was here this morning.* The weather, as regular readers know too well, has been gruesome**. Usually hellhounds and I get out as early as possible but lately I’ve taken to hanging around and hoping the temperature will creak upward a little. So Daisy was here before hellhounds had had their domesticating walk and they were a trifle . . . exuberant. Eventually I felt that joy in life and visitors had been sufficiently expressed, and I said so. Hellhounds subsided. Oh! said Daisy. You have trained them so well!
I what? I thought, looking around bemusedly. One of the curious semi-virtues of most sighthound breeds is that they have an attention span of zip, even including for the promulgation and articulation of rapture and jubilation. You can take advantage of this. This is not, strictly speaking, training. And then I remembered: Daisy has a four month old puppy. She’s not herself. And her judgement is seriously frelled.
It’s funny though, hellhounds’ sheer beauty messes with people’s heads.*** I’m used to little old people tottering up to tell me how beautiful they are–while I clutch frantically at their harnesses so that no one gets knocked down, including me–but I also have teenagers shouting after us saying things like I love your gorgeous dogs so much it hurts! I had one girl, sitting among a large party of her friends, call as we walked by, Those dogs are even better looking than —— !, which made the rest of the mob go off in hysterics. I long to know if —— is merely the cutest boy in their class, or if he’s the latest media heartthrob, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to stop and ask so I’ll never know. I’m sure my hellhounds are better looking than he is, whoever he is.
And then there was the very tall, very straight, very ex-military-looking elderly gentleman out walking his Jack Russell across the top of one of my favourite hills a few weeks ago who said as we passed, I’ll have a fiver on them each way. I said, pointing at Chaos, he’s faster. Oh, well, I’ll have a twenty on him then, said the elderly gentleman.
But you get used to how sweet and adorable they are†, and you get a little blasé watching Chaos in particular murdering dozens of plastic bags and hundreds of plastic bottles†† and a few gloves and the occasional hat, and you may forget that that is, in fact, exactly what he’s doing: killing them. I tend to frog-march them through sheep fields and they are sufficiently resigned to my lack of sense of humour about livestock that unless the sheep positively run under their noses going nyah nyah nyah‡ hellhounds mostly ignore them. With perhaps a few wistful looks–and sidelong glances at me.
Unless there’s a sheep by herself. Especially if, by our passing, we’ve cut her off from the rest. Then suddenly I have two small, exquisitely streamlined wolves dancing intently on the ends of their leads and staring, prick-eared, straight-backed, stiff-tailed. It’s a reminder that dogs are still what they were 40,000 years ago when they started sleeping by our fires: it’s a reminder that anyone who keeps a cat for its mousing abilities is entirely familiar with. But not so much with pet dogs. I’m braced for them to chase rabbits, if there are rabbits underfoot. But it gives me a slight atavistic frisson seeing them acting on the instinct that says, if you want to bring down something bigger than you are, first separate it from its fellows.
They’re still adorable.‡‡ And, anyone want a Dalmatian? Ajlr sent me this link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7815893.stm
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* Yes, I also owe you a pupdate. Recent highlights include the sock watch. Mike ate a pair of socks.^ Yes. Apparently the first one was so tasty he had to go back for the second too. The vets said, if they don’t reappear in x amount of time . . . but they did. ^^
^ Whose idea was it that small children and puppies are a good plan? You can’t reliably train a seven year old not to leave her socks lying around. At least this means they’re really little socks.
^^Granddaughter, however, has been informed that she is to remain barefoot until Mike grows out of the sock-eating stage. He’d probably be happy to eat mittens instead though.
** It was 19F/-7C on my windowsill weather station at 2 am this morning, but the radio said we had ten degrees of frost last night. So I went out sadly to remove the cardboard box and bubble wrap from the dead geranium one last time . . . but a few hours later it had (painfully) straightened up and was holding out a few battered-looking leaves to what there was of the sunlight.^ So I wrapped it up again tonight. It’s predicted to warm up this weekend. Oh yes, and my greenhouse/sitting-room light was supposed to show up today. It didn’t.
^ I feel a lot like it looks.
*** Not that everyone finds them beautiful however. I had one little girl say, clearly disapprovingly, in the carrying voice of little girls, Those dogs are very thin. Whereupon her brother in his pushchair started yelling, Thin dogs! Thin dogs! The little girl was pretty thin herself. I suspect her of feeling unduly harassed to eat up her greens so she’ll grow big and strong.
† Except when you want to lock them up till they’re old because they’re being such disobedient little ratbags. And very cold weather does not bring out their best.
†† People are slobs
††† I think I’ve told you I simply won’t take dogs into a field with cows in it, I don’t care if the public footpath is through it
‡ And there are sheep that will, drat them, and I’m sure there’s another sheep hiding in the bushes ready to jump out and arrest us if we misbehave. Aren’t there laws against entrapment?
‡‡ And I’m still letting them on the bed . . . if I have a convalescent nap during the day.
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PS: I’m listening to Nightwaves on Radio Three while I write this, and one of the items is an interview with the playwright David Hare. I have mixed feelings about Hare; I’ve seen a few of his plays and . . . he is certainly very determined that you shouldn’t miss the point. But in the interview he talks about having been raised lower middle class and that he still–at the age of 61, and after a long successful career–he’s also a Sir–finds being a member of the arts crowd exciting, and still says gleefully to himself, I have a play at the National Theatre. ^ Okay. I like him better than I did. I still get a rush out of holding my first copy of my new book: and I want still to have that rush, even in a few more decades when I’m the oldest living writer still cranking ‘em out. My guess is that you have to have that rush to be doing your job properly. I could be wrong. But I like it that Sir David Hare still has it.
^ http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/39451/productions/gethsemane.html :
‘Gethsemane is David Hare’s fourteenth original play for the National Theatre.’ [italics mine]
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