Dear Hugh 4
Wednesday May 10th
DEAR HUGH,
I now have a dog. No job, but a best friend instead. Nice to have at least one, if you excuse present reading company.
I realise that the fact that I have spent all of my 49 years to date being dog-less rather insinuates that I am not of the Crufts persuasion, but as Brigitte Bardot rather excellently once said “only animals and imbeciles cannot change their minds”. Besides, I had to get one. The quack advised it. She was evidently sick of prescribing in triplicate the monthly renewals of my one-man bid to ingest most of the Roche company’s manufacture and so she advised me to get this dog.
When I wondered why she told me that apparently dogs are good for depression. I pointed out to her (rather curtly) that according to her diagnosis I already had depression, severe depression no less, and so I didn’t need a dog to go fetch it for me. Then she said that what she meant was that “studies showed” that walking a dog was a good cure for depression. I said why and she said it was to do with the exercise, apparently having a dog made you walk more briskly and rapid walking was good for the blues. So I said that if that was the case maybe I could speed up the process of my mental recovery by getting a gazelle. She said she thought I was mad and I said we had already established that.
Anyway, I now am Daddy to this long-haired bundle of Prozac called Jimi. I didn’t name him that; that was the name that he came with from the rescue centre. They said he was a stray from Ireland and that his name was Jimmy. Naturally, to make him feel at home, I spent the first few days of having him practising a thunderous Ian Paisley impression by yelling hurl, Jummuy and sut! But he paid sod-all attention to that, so I presume that he is from the south. Although I’m not sure about this because when I play him some rebel music on my tin whistle he cowers and leaves the room. But then so does everybody else.
Anyway, in a bid to show that we are right-on and cool we have named him Jimi after the creator of the Voodoo guitar that emanates at volume ear-bleed for all hours from the room of my youngest chile.
You are possibly curious about the breed of this here Jimi. I’ve been going about saying that he is cross between a retriever (because he looks like one) and a red setter (because his coat is redd-ish) but apparently I was wrong. Apparently the correct definition of his mongrelism is that he is a retriever and Tibetan spaniel cross. I think that they may have got this wrong because I looked up Tibetan spaniel on the Net and the dog displayed looked like the Dalai Lama had backed his bus into its face.
So I’m sticking to my red setter claim, not least because you know what adoptees get like; they reach an age when they start demanding details of their parentage and the last thing I want in a few years’ time is a dog with a shaved head, wearing an orange dress and stinking up the house with incense.
Anyway he is very loving and I am rapidly discovering why I have not had a dog before. Aside from the fact that I am taking so many walks that I’m in line for the Duke Of Edinburgh’s Award, there is the problem with grooming.They said that he needs to have his hair brushed once a day. Of course I protested that brushing mine once a year had to date proved perfectly adequate but they argued back that I was not prone to getting ticks. I thought it wise not to enlighten them on that one and so off we went again to the pet shop to add to my already-sizeable donation to its proprietor’s pension plan.
As you can guess, I had to seek an assistant’s help on finding a hairbrush, as I have very little experience of what one looks like, but this done I returned home with a determination to groom him with all of the enthusiasm of Marie Antoniette’s handmaid.
Damn me if I didn’t find a tick straight away! After yelling that I had discovered something burrowed into the fur on his back, I called for help to hold him down whilst I fetched the tweezers. I plucked it off and was surprised that it came away without me having to resort to the traditional method of burning it off with a cigarette.
Damn odd-looking tick, I thought, examining the thing in the tweezers that looked as if it had some form of copper wire in its head. It was only later that I discovered that I had torn out Jimi’s micro-chip implant. Still, it’s early days and if this regime of five walks a day keeps up, I’m told that I’ll be out of this cell in no time. Shame, as I shall miss its padding.
GB