#4: walk the dog without terror

Disposophobia is the fear of losing something, although usually it is linked to those suffering with hoarding syndrome, in that, they keep hold of everything rather than losing it. Makes sense: it’s like Paul with his 24 Lidl Pick-Ups in the LOCKED snack box in the fridge. Cynophobia is the fear of dogs, and I learned something new digging into that because I was expecting canine-o-phobia or similar, but no, cyno is Greek for dogs, and as the word phobia itself is from the Greek ‘phóbos’, all phobia prefixes are usually in Greek. The More You Know. Whilst we’re here: what’s a Grecian urn? Easy: probably a very reasonable wage dictated by a fairly strong economy and mandated via some of the international laws and agreements enjoyed by being part of the European Union. So, yes, disposocynophobia: the fear of losing your dog.

Now you must understand: I don’t mean losing your dog like the time my dad took my sister and I to one side and explained a beloved cat had gone to live on a farm only for that lie to crumble just a few months later when I pulled a rib-cage out of the garden whilst trying to bury a broken plate. No, I’ve made peace with the fact that our beloved will one day go to sleep forever and I’ll need to book a round-the-world holiday so I at least have some plane tickets to daintily dab my eyes with. You best believe I’m already planning the layout of the ‘over the rainbow bridge’ collage (Gooey sat tastefully next to a Caramac bar, the Sycamore Gap tree and a Lynx Voodoo gift-set) that I’m going to get blown up onto an A1-sized canvas and hang over the fire. We don’t currently have a fire, but it’s important to be aspirational in life. A Spaniel usually lives for around thirteen years so we have eleven more to go, and whilst that’s a significant outlay in terms of tins of Chappie and over 12,000 more shits to pick up over the course of his life, we’ve got a while together yet.

My first dog was Shannon, a giant blue merle collie with a wonderful disposition. A nanny dog, and not in the way that ‘nanny dog’ is used now, where it’s generally applied to a toothsome sack of muscle the size of a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe who has returned home from walking the streets with a man’s arm sticking out of their mouth. I’m not sure if it is the ‘wagon-wheels aren’t getting smaller, your hands are getting bigger’ nostalgia but I remember Shannon being absolutely colossal: a dog you could ridden into battle. He died when I was six and my favourite memory I have of him was when one of extended family came to stay with us during the summer. She got off the bus, made to walk up the lane to our house, and Shannon went hurtling down and bit her smartly on the arm. It was perhaps the rustling of her shellsuit that didn’t sit well in his ears. She went back home on the next bus, and Shannon died not too long after. I’m sure the two events are unrelated, in much the same way that the half the copper wiring in the village went missing that very same hour was surely just coincidence.

Next came Bracken, a stray staffie who jumped into my mother’s car whilst she was out delivering freshly-ironed clothes to the rich folk who couldn’t entertain the idea of doing their own ironing. She used to run her own little brilliantly-named business (The Iron Maidens) ironing clothes at home: so many of my formative childhood memories feature her shouting at Countdown in a haze of steam and starch. She’s long since given up that business, although she maintains the image with heaving clouds of Lambert & Butler and, forever aware that my books did well and I can no longer get away with getting her J-Lo ‘Glow’ for Christmas, Coco Mademoiselle. Bracken stayed with us for a while but he was an old dog and, as I said, went to live on a farm not too long after. That wasn’t even my parents being sensitive: he literally did go and live his last days out on a farm.

Then came Oscar, an orange and white collie who spent most of his days doing one of two things: smouldering in front of the coal fire (and with orange fur, that was a dangerous business) and running away from any faintly loud noise. He was the dog of my childhood then, and most of my memories of him involved either the most amazing post-poo zoomies or me chasing him plaintively over fields as he ran away from the crackshot of the bird-scarers. Oscar lived long enough to see me move out and even met Paul a couple of times, before wandering into the bathroom recently vacated by my father and dropping down dead on the bathroom rug at the good old age of seventeen.

Then there was almost fifteen years of not having a dog of our own: with both of us working the time was barely right for us to look after one another, let alone a dog. Then COVID and the books happened, I gave up my terribly exciting (your experience may vary) job in law and we were able to get a canine companion. I wanted to get a St. Bernard based purely on the Beethoven movies, Paul said anything other than a Dalmatian. A Springer Spaniel was never considered until I saw how hilarious their ears look when they run and, after a bit more research, I surprised Paul with Goombella. Honestly, I’ve seen Paul look delighted many times over: when I bring a Costco pizza out of the boot, when I say I’m going away for ten days, when he finds a Revel he’s dropped down the crack of the sofa, but I’ve never seen his face light up like it did when I brought Googookajoo home. It was delightful.

We took to dog ownership like ducks to water, which is somewhat ironic given Goo-do-you-think-you-are was petrified of water for the first few months. It took him running into the sea after a stick and suddenly being surprised by being underwater for him to realise being in the water can be a good thing, though that first moment where he disappeared took about seven years off my life. Now we can’t keep him dry: if Gü sees anything wet he’s straight in there: doesn’t matter if it’s a lake or a slurry pit, as long as he can get enough on his fur to make sure our carpets are ruined when he gets back he’s happy.

As Paul spoils G-Dog absolutely rotten (something he refutes, but I’ve seen the receipts for the extra cheeseburger on our McDonald’s app), he’s very much Paul’s dog. Paul is very much the fun parent, I’m very much the strict one in charge. One thing I absolutely adore over the last two years are the times I’ve come early to hear Paul singing or talking away to Goo in the kitchen without a care in the world, although it probably gives the neighbours pause when he’s loudly congratulating him for having a crap.

Knowing how important it is to socialise your dog with others, we enrolled him into an adorable daycare centre where he spends his days playing and running about. He also has his own little wooden box to sleep in, it’s all very cute and ‘yes, we shop at Waitrose, and what of it’. As a result, he’s absolutely wonderful around other dogs and people, and we genuinely couldn’t hope for a better behaved dog. Springers are smart and easy to train given how food-motivated they are: Goombaloo can hear someone opening a packet of crisps in the next county over and will sit and stare at you until you give him permission to snaffle whatever you’ve dropped on the floor. He really is a delight.

But we created a bit of a rod for our own backs by putting him into daycare for socialisation. See, we suffer with terrible guilt if he has to spend a weekday here: we wring our hands and look contritely at each other, torn up with the idea he’s missing his friends and that really, a day spent with us, furnished though it is with lots of fun and a good walk, just isn’t up to snuff. As a result, daycare became a daily thing, despite me working from home. We didn’t want him missing out, although I did very much miss the money that was pouring out of our bank account. I’ll come back to this conundrum in a paragraph or two.

There was another problem: I became anxious when taking him for a walk. Not because I didn’t want to pick up his plops, indeed, Mr Goo keeps things interesting by waiting until the most inopportune moment to start his crab-walking and line-of-shite stare. His personal best was squatting down as we crossed over a zebra crossing in front of two lanes of waiting traffic: having to gently pull your dog along whilst he’s dropping the kids off is a sobering affair. I went back to pick up the worst of it only for a car to lose patience swerve around us and get poo all over his tyres, which delighted me. And it’s not as though he’s the type of dog who will take the opportunity to chew a child’s face off if you don’t give him your full attention. In fact, he’s like me with children: couldn’t care less.

When he first arrived and we started taking him for walks, he was good as gold – then one day I was walking him alone across the fields near where we live when his hunting instinct kicked in and he went barrelling off like his arse was on fire. Hunting instinct, by the way, is described as when the dog is ‘nose to the ground, bottom in the air, rooting around in the undergrowth’ – he takes after his dads! Twenty minutes of searching and, perhaps most devastatingly of all, me having to run, before he turned up like nothing had happened. We exchanged stern words in the car on the way home. A few weeks later he repeated this trick with Paul, with me pootling around Scotland at the time. He didn’t turn back up and I was halfway to breaking the speed of light down the A1 when we got a phone call from a lovely woman to say he had ran out in front of her car (probably needing a crap). Again, he remained entirely nonchalant of his little adventure, but it, to put it in clean scientific terms, it shit us right up.

Since those days, I’ve been so wary of walking him by myself. The terror of him running off and me losing him forever was far too much. G-Dog has good recall when he wants to but young dogs, especially Spaniels, are prone to selective deafness when they want to do their own thing. Take the drop command: Dr Goo will cheerfully release anything he’s picked up around the home in response to an open palm and a firm ‘drop’, but outside, if he’s picked up a diseased seagull carcass or a seal leg from the beach, those ‘drops’ mean nothing and he’ll gambol about crunching away on the rotting flesh. It’s awful, and I always feel terribly guilty when he’s home and licking Paul’s face in welcome. It’s the same with his recall function: he’ll usually come back, but if there’s something terrifically exciting like a crisp packet blowing in a hedge or a horse to look at, he’ll come back on his own terms. It made for a stressful time.

Now don’t read this wrong: he was still walked plenty – an adult Spaniel needs around ninety minutes of walking a day, so we were never so cruel as to not give him that. But I was always so wary of walking him alone, so it was usually Paul and I heading out somewhere we knew well, so all was fine.

Then, fuelled by two things – namely the creation of this wish-list of mine and the fact that daycare was costing so much, I decided enough was enough. I was going to break the back of walking him alone and get him to a point where he would walk with me and I wouldn’t be a nervous wreck shouting after him all the time as he darted about. Daycare would reduce to two days a week so he would still see his friends, and on the days he is here with me, he’d get a three hour walk. It was a deal that would work for the both of us: I get to exercise these fat little hams I call my legs, he gets to spend thirty minutes minimum making sure there’s drool all over the back seats in my car. We also have PitPat now, which is a little tracker that clips to his collar and ‘phones home’ every couple of seconds, so we can track him if he does scoot off. It’s reassuring when he disappears off into the wilderness and you can keep an eye on where he is. We did have an exciting drama a few weeks ago when his PitPat fell off in a forest and we didn’t realise until we checked his collar the next day. The PitPat was showing as having 2% battery and was quite literally in the middle of nowhere, leading to an exciting dash in the car and some judicious use of what3words and bigCwords. I felt like Anneka Rice in Treasure Hunt, although I didn’t have to do some maypole dancing or gatecrash a WI meeting, so there is that.

The first couple of weeks were a bit hairy: I was trying to ‘relax’ whilst walking him, so that he in turn would relax, and I kept to beaches where there’s not an awful lot of room for him to run away. There was still a fair bit of shouting when he turned into a tiny dot on the horizon, but then I noticed something important: he keeps looking back. He may get a scent and run off to follow it, but he will look over his shoulder every 50m or so and if I’ve stopped still or turned around, he will come running back. If he can see me, he’s happy. Now that I’ve realised this, so am I.

And honestly, it’s made such a difference. I like to think I’m a good dog-dad, even if I’m stingier with the treats than Paul is, but I’m sure it was probably stressing Gooella-de-Ville to have me caterwauling all through the walk. It was certainly stressing me, although it was nice to have a genuine reason for my sore throat when I returned from my countryside walks. But now I walk him with confidence and it’s a delight, it really is. You’ll see one of the photos I took of the little bugger right at the top of the page. That’s a happy, happy dog. I’d still like him to get better on the lead because for the first ten minutes or so before I can let him off, it’s like being pulled along by a departing train, but one thing at a time.

I appreciate that ‘learning to walk the dog’ isn’t the most exciting or funny blog entry, but the purpose of the list is to do things that I’ve been putting off or righting situations that have been causing me unnecessary stress or angst, and whilst it has taken almost two years to really crack this one, I’m going to count it as a success.

List progress: 4/39

26 November 2023