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I look outside my back door and see the little kritter chewing the heads off one of my favourite blue hydrangeas and think, ‘Ah, well, it’s had its day.’
She’s worn me down. Despite being a natural obsessive, I’ve become laissez-faire. She started off sleeping in her special dog cage — I think they call it a crate, rather disconcertingly — and now she sleeps on the bed. I wake up in the morning missing my earplugs and with more than usually matted hair.
I went to have my highlights done and the hairdresser brushed my hair out and said, ‘You do realise you’ve got a bald patch at the back of your head, don’t you?’
‘Puppy,’ I said.
I went to the doctor’s with food poisoning (venison carpaccio, never again) and when the GP took my blood pressure she gasped at all the puncture holes going up my left arm.
‘Puppy,’ I said, ‘honestly.’
I take her out into the garden each morning and she poos a series of perfectly formed little blue wax balls. Like a true doggy slob, I have the thought: ‘They’re expensive, these things. Maybe I could just swill them under the…’ Then I get a grip of myself and throw them away.
Exhausted, I fall asleep on the sofa mid-afternoon with her chewing a loo roll and wake up to find that she’s moved on to my best riding gloves. How she finds these things I have no idea. The gloves were tucked away in the bottom of a bag in the cupboard under the stairs which is locked.
I suppose I got what I paid for. She’s a working spaniel, bred to retrieve objects from the most difficult of locations. I’m hoping that I will in time be able to convert her ability to fetch a bikini from a chest of drawers into a talent for retrieving pheasants. But the gamekeeper is not convinced. He thinks her silly suburban lifestyle is going to ruin her fancy bloodlines (she has relatives called things like Danderw Druid and Mallowdale Rackatear). He says he’s never heard of a gundog trained to retrieve Jimmy Choos. He says I am letting the side down. I think he is being a stick-in-the-mud. Surely there are no end of uses for such a creature, I tell him. I can see us at the Harrods January sale, for example: ‘Hup! Hup!’
Yesterday, I had to take her back to the breeder so I could take my mother to Italy for a minibreak. Long John sussed it all out as soon as he opened the door. As we were still standing on the front step he sniffed the air. ‘Hello, smelly,’ he said, taking the puppy out of my arms.
‘I only turned my back for a second,’ I said, ‘and she nicked a piece of sponge cake off the kitchen table. And some carrot cake. And then she may have been a tiny bit sick in the car…’
Next I had to explain the diamond-studded collar. ‘It’s only temporary,’ I pleaded. ‘They didn’t have anything her colour in the shop…actually, I’ll just take it off…dog chews?’ I got a little rawhide shoe out of my bag. He shook his head. ‘We don’t want her to chew birds, do we?’ he said. ‘No, absolutely not,’ I said, throwing the chew back in the bag and shrugging like it was nothing to do with me. ‘Dreadful things. Awful. In fact, I’ve only let her have one, so I could get a stiletto out of her mouth…’ When you’re in a hole, stop digging.
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