When Dennis was five months old, I mournfully booked his first haircut. Mournfully, because he had little black tufts of puppy fuzz and I knew these would be snipped off, never to be seen again. My then boyfriend, with whom I’d decided to get Dennis, rolled his eyes and asked nervously if I was going to become one of those weirdos who kept a lock of hair in a cupboard.
I went online and looked up personalised lockets. There’s a booming industry catering to those of us who are silly about our pets. If I so wished, I could spend around £80 on a silver locket or glass pendant with a scrap of Dennis’s hair carefully preserved within it.
Such trinkets were apparently often bought by those who had just lost a pet. ‘Love my locket. Dizzy can come with me everywhere, just how she use too [sic],’ said one review. ‘Now I can keep my fur baby with me alway [sic],’ said another. Dennis was only tiny at that stage, hopefully with many years to go, but why not buy a locket for a scrap of his puppy fur? I clicked on the link and emailed it to my boyfriend. I wasn’t actually going to buy one because I’m not an actual maniac; it was all a big tease.
He broke up with me two weeks later. No sense of humour, some people.
The question of how to commemorate pets came back to me this week because a nice artist called Caroline Priestley got in touch via Instagram, saying she’d recently read my memoir about getting a puppy and losing a boyfriend (out this week in paperback if you fancy a copy or four), and had been moved to draw Dennis in pastel. Very kindly, she offered to pop it in the post and it even arrived framed.
It’s lovely. She’s got his truculent, Just William expression spot on, which isn’t always a given. I’ve seen plenty of portraits of other dogs which aren’t quite right. The portrait looks like a labrador, or a Border terrier, or a noble whippet, sure, but it doesn’t look like that specific labrador, whippet or terrier. Something wrong with the eyes or its face.
Caroline had an entry accepted into the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition this year, a drawing of a ginger woman in a fur coat, clutching a tabby cat to her bosom. ‘Fur coat no whiskers’ it was called, so she’s clearly a lady with a sense of humour. Her website shows charming, whimsical portraits of greying labradors, a pug in a dog bed beside a spaniel, two Airedales in woolly jumpers and seven Yorkshire terriers on a sofa together, among others. Her picture of Dennis, looking as if I’ve just ticked him off for eating the contents of a wastepaper bin yet again, will go on my kitchen wall.
If you’re after a pet portrait, do you go charcoal or oil? Watercolour or moody photograph? Queen Victoria simply ordered Landseer to knock out another one when she fancied a spaniel in a different light, but how do you find the artist who can really capture them? When the cartoonist Zebedee Helm (very fancy, he does all the dog packaging for Fortnum) was commissioned to illustrate my dog memoir, I insisted that we meet so he could ‘really understand’ Dennis’s character, instead of working from photos. Dennis and I duly went for lunch at Zebedee’s charming Lewes house, where he played along by talking to Dennis and overlooking the number of pencils chewed in his studio.
There’s a chap in Staffordshire who’ll take your deceased dog and hand you back its articulated skeleton
Actually, if you have the cash, the thing to commission is a bronze by the sculptor Tanya Russell. She made the handsome lion that pounces from his plinth at Villa Park (the Aston Villa ground, as I’m sure you knew), but her bespoke dog sculptures are very popular among those who have a spare £25,000 knocking about. And also patience, since her waiting list is over a year long. She’s huge in the Cotswolds.
Or you could follow the bold example set by the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland and have your dog taxidermied. When I visited Alnwick some years ago to interview the duke, I noticed various stiff dogs around us in the library. Suspiciously stiff. Dead, in fact. They were former family pets, stuffed and dotted around the castle. I’m not sure, when the sad day comes, that I could do the same with Dennis. No glass eyes, thank you, although it would be quite restful for him to remain still for a few moments.
Alternatively, there’s a chap in Staffordshire called Luke Williams who’ll take your deceased dog and hand you back its articulated skeleton. Turnaround time varies, says Luke’s website, because the process is ‘all down to the fat content in the bone’. There’s an example of his work on his homepage, the skeleton of a pet dog called ‘Terry’, curled up in his old dog bed, all enclosed in a glass display case. Last month, Luke had to pause commissions because he’s backed up with more than 60 clients waiting for deliveries, so you probably can’t get your skeleton sorted for this Christmas, but you may have better luck next year. Makes a locket of puppy hair look quite innocuous, doesn’t it?
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