Dogs

I come out of my ayurvedic massage in Kerala all oily. I look like one of those sad birds you see sometimes after a tanker spill, feathers weighed down and shiny with gunk. Then I look at my phone. The point of my trip to India is to look at my phone less. The ayurvedic doctor has already told me that my doshas are out of balance and suggested that I should become less of a ‘go, go, go’ person. But I look at my phone anyway because I am a hopeless addict. I have five messages and four missed calls from the dog sitter. ‘Dennis found a sock and, before I could take it from him, he swallowed it whole. It looked small and he’s acting normal but I called the vet so they could tell me which emergency clinic I can bring him to.

The valet parking man at Gatwick climbed out of my car with an expression that suggested he’d just driven a Panzer at the Russian border as opposed to bringing a very underpowered VW Polo around from the car park. ‘Madam,’ he began, unsteadily. ‘I need to have a word with you about the state of your car.’ I apologised. My Polo is an abysmal state. Empty coffee cups, paper napkins, crinkled bags that once contained sandwiches or doughnuts, plastic water bottles, 58 hair ties, decaying dog biscuits and poo bags (albeit unused) all litter the floor. It’s also disgracefully muddy because Dennis doesn’t go in the boot. He either sits beside me in the front, or lies along the back seat as if I am his chauffeur and he is a debutante who’s overdone it at The 400.

Q. I have a good relationship with a neighbor. She has a labrador and I have a Jack Russell. If I cannot walk my dog she will do it and vice versa. Yesterday my daughter visited unexpectedly and was at the top of the house when she heard my neighbor open the front door and call my dog for his walk. Five minutes later she heard the dog being returned to the house. I don’t want to fall out with my neighbor but I would always walk her labrador for at least 45 minutes and my dog needs a proper walk every day. How should I proceed? N.B., Stockbridge A. Fitness trackers for dogs are all the rage – attached to the collar, they count steps and provide GPS tracking.

Dennis refuses to step on to the scales at the vet. Perhaps he’s nervous about his holiday weight. The upshot is that I have to climb on the scales holding him, and then again without him, so the receptionist can work out the difference. It makes for quite a humiliating morning, shouting my weight across a crowded veterinary waiting room. A woman clutching an elderly cat looks determinedly at the floor. It’s our third trip to the vet in a week. Grass seed season is particularly bad this year, they say, on account of the heat, which has turned the seeds brittle and more likely to penetrate paws and ears. Local councils and their obsession with rewilding is also to blame, chunter some dog owners, since they’ve used this fashionable eco policy as an excuse not to mow.

‘No dog of mine will sleep on my bed,’ I swore, before Dennis came along. People who allowed dogs on their beds were feeble, I believed, not far removed from the sort of parent you overhear in restaurants saying: ‘Persephone, if you do that again Daddy’s going to get jolly cross.’ I’d be more disciplined. My dog would sleep in the kitchen, like any self-respecting normal dog. Dennis arrived, just ten weeks old, and on his first night was duly shut in the secondhand crate I’d bought on Facebook Marketplace for £20, from a woman who owned a mastiff called Hades. This crate was in my kitchen. Might my single status and attitude towards dogs on beds be somehow correlated, I hear you muse I went to bed and tried to ignore the pitiful mewling. Guess how long I lasted?

Two summers ago, when Dennis was a puppy, I went to the vet to get the 793 bits of paper (one-time entry only) now required to take a dog to Europe. ‘That’ll be £265, please,’ the receptionist told me. ‘What?’ I cried. ‘He could go to Eton for less!’ This didn’t seem to elicit much of a response from the receptionist (more of a Harrow woman, perhaps?), so I duly paid up and left.

Back in the day, Chelsea Flower Show was regarded as the beginning of the Season. Queen Alexandra opened the festivities in 1913, when it moved from the Embankment to its current location in SW3. It must have rained that day for there’s a terrific photo of her (dressed in black, so jolly) strolling beside several gentlemen in top hats, and all are carrying umbrellas. There was considerable grumbling about Chelsea this year, however – too crowded, too many shops, and it was sponsored by that nature-friendly marque, Range Rover. May I suggest a contemporary alternative to herald the start of summer? It’s Goodwoof. This is the two-day dog festival held in the leafy grounds of Goodwood every May.

On Petersfield station, southbound side, there’s a huge billboard advertising a tropical holiday with a photo of a beautiful couple joyfully splashing each other in the water. I walked past it, stopped, walked back and stared. ‘Adults-only holiday,’ read the billboard. ‘Entirely child-free.’ But this wasn’t ‘adults only’ in the 20th-century sense: getting frisky with strangers after a pink gin and an all-you-can-eat buffet. What was being sold was a holiday guaranteed to contain not a squeak of any disgusting child, and the whole tone of the advert was one of joyful relief: At last! Just what we’ve all always wanted, but never dared to admit!

‘Whippets are simply ducal,’ a grand friend pants at me in her drawing room when I ask her why she owns one. Certainly not a Regency duke, I mutter, looking at the fawn skeleton lying in wait on the brocade sofa. Because to me, whippets aren’t posh, just as Michael Heseltine isn’t fooling me all these years later. Rather, I find them sinister: the endless jutting ribs, the paper-thin coat, the incessant shaking. But I know I am not in good company. Whippets, the Ozempic-coded dog of our age, have been taken up by high society in their droves.

"Do you know who I am?" said the voice belonging to the lady who used to be my mother, crossly, at the end of the phone line. The truthful answer is no. Since the dementia took hold, a hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body. A hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body No matter what I do, no matter how many times I ring or visit her, this person who used to be my mother is always cross and disappointed. "Oh, you’re alive are you!" the strange voice barks, before asking me what I’m up to, with a sarcastic edge. Whatever I tell her I’m doing, even if I say I’m lying down with a headache, she snaps back: "That’s nice for you. You enjoy!

The dog café had a pretty pink sign describing its many services and I stood outside it mesmerised as I realised what it was. This was not a café where dogs were allowed. This was a café for dogs. I peeked inside and there were dog baskets for the customers to lounge in as they drank their puppuccinos. There are so many things about Britain that are too subtle for me when I re-enter the atmosphere as an expat My friend and I were on our way to dinner on the Fulham Road and we ended up standing by this café as I stared with my mouth open and asked her repeatedly how this could be. There are so many things about Britain that are too subtle for me now when I re-enter the atmosphere as an expat.

I set up In Our Time 27 years ago. I had been shunted from Start the Week to what was cheerfully known as the ‘death slot’, 9 a.m. on Thursdays, because BBC management decided I could no longer present that programme after becoming a member of the House of Lords. I know I’ve said it before elsewhere, but its success from those inauspicious beginnings was very fulfilling for me. I decided to retire from IoT in September. I will miss it as it gave me a tremendous education, but I know it will be in very good hands – Misha Glenny is a first-class broadcaster and writer. While passing on the baton, I would like to say how much the audience reaction always meant to me. There were many young people who reacted to the programme and the podcast.

We knew the church would be packed as Shelley had died so young. We knew the church would be freezing, as her funeral fell during the Arctic spell that whitened the bracken and iced over puddles the colour of Dairy Milk. When we drove into Simonsbath just after lunchtime, the sun was only grazing the hilltops, leaving valleys in deep shadows. We’d allowed plenty of time, but the lanes were already crammed with vehicles. My husband and I had intended to stand at the back of St Luke’s so as not to take up precious places, but thanks to Ivo’s near-village-elder status we were ordered into the emergency seating in the chancel.