Diary of a Dog-walker (17 page)

Kudu suffered horribly during the London August heat. But that was as nothing to the high-summer furnace of south-east Turkey, and my heart went out to the dogs of Ka
ş
. Most lay panting and
immobile, piles of sweat-soaked fur on the pavements. The lucky few in shops cuddled their air-conditioning units as if they were radiators in winter.

Turkey famously mixes East and West. Its canine culture at first appears Middle Eastern: feral dogs roam the roads (I had two near misses in the hire car) and Western travellers who visited Istanbul in search of the exotic during the nineteenth century (like the French poets Lamartine and Nerval) remarked on the wild packs in the city's streets. Mark Twain wrote: ‘I never saw such utterly wretched, starving, sad-visaged, broken-hearted looking curs in my life … I thought I was lazy, but I am a steam-engine compared to a Constantinople dog.'

Yet as the burning day cooled into evening in Ka
ş
, a more English, even Home Counties doggy world was revealed. Well-dressed families with pedigrees on leads sauntered among the cafés around the mosque on the harbour front, and joggers with Labradors and Spaniels at their heels could be spotted sweating up the hill outside town.

It made me wonder whether Islam is as anti-dog as we assume.

There was a slew of press stories over the summer about dogs being turned off London buses because they might offend Muslims (no chance of Kudu suffering this indignity: he insists on being
chauffeured and sits upright on the back seat in a plutocratic manner), and it was reported that even guide dogs had been treated in this way.

There is certainly a strand of scholarly Islamic opinion that regards dogs as ritually unclean. A dog-owning BBC colleague was astonished to find that a Muslim he had invited to lunch turned up with a spare suit: his guest said that he had been advised by his imam that the presence of even one dog-hair on his clothes would negate the power of his prayers.

But there is a dog story in the Koran that suggests the Prophet may have thought differently – and it is one of those intriguing texts that demonstrate how closely the great religions of Europe and the Middle East are related.

Its origins lie in a Christian legend. Around 250 AD, seven young noblemen in the ancient city of Ephesus – not so very far up the coast from our holiday port of Ka
ş
– were accused of being Christians during the persecution by the Roman emperor Decius. Rather than deny their faith, they gave their money to the poor and retired to a cave in the mountains to pray. The emperor ruled that the mouth of the cave should be walled up, leaving them to die inside.

Three hundred years later – so the story goes – a local landowner broke down the wall so that he could use the cave as a cattle pen. The seven
Christian heroes were still alive – they had apparently slept through the intervening three centuries, and were startled to find themselves in a world where their faith had become mainstream. After a brief but joyful re-entry to the land of the living they expired, and were later made famous throughout Europe in early Christian writings.

Fast-forward three hundred years and we find the Prophet Muhammad being tested by the people of Mecca. The Jews of Medina have sent them a clever question: does Muhammad know about the Seven Sleepers? If he does, he is truly a prophet; if he does not, then he is a fraud. Muhammad duly produces Sura 18, The Cave, in which he tells the Seven Sleepers' story.

But Muhammad's version has a twist: he describes the Sleepers ‘with their dog stretching out its forelegs' at the entrance to the cave, and the Sura is quite insistent about the dog's presence as a key element in the story. This dog, Katmir, is said to have stayed awake for the full three centuries, watching over his charges, and some sources suggest it is one of the nine animals that will be allowed into Paradise. Ritually unclean? Surely not.

Kudu is certainly unclean in a more literal sense. Returning from baking Turkey to find London awash with rain delighted me for a while, but I very quickly tired of damp walks. Kudu, however, is absolutely
jubilant that the dog-days of summer are over, and takes full advantage of every puddle available.

A month or so after writing the column above I was recording a Radio 4 programme in Istanbul, and managed to escape duty for a couple of hours to wander round the Grand Bazaar. I found a stall selling nineteenth-century illuminated pages from Ottoman story books; they were the most beautiful artefacts, but very expensive, and I was having terrible trouble deciding which one to buy until an illustration of the Seven Sleepers story emerged from the pile. The artist had painted Katmir in a style similar to that of a
Snoopy
cartoon, and he has a definite paunch in the picture. What is more he is, unlike the Katmir of the Koran, clearly asleep, which suggests an Ottoman playfulness in the treatment of the sacred texts. It was an irresistible buy.

The news that Kudu's column in the
Telegraph
was being put to sleep reached me on return from our summer holiday in Turkey. Whenever I lose a contract or have a show canned it seems to happen in the most awkward and unlikely circumstances.

Many years ago I had a weekly radio programme, which was axed as part of a network shake-up. There were lots of stories in the papers confidently predicting its demise, so when the executive in charge asked me up to her office after the show one morning, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. Gloriously, the lift got stuck, and since it was full of people, we could not very well have the conversation we both knew was
coming. We made painful small talk for the half-hour or so that it took for the engineers to do their thing.

By the time we were finally deposited back on the ground floor I was running late for my next appointment, and politely explained that I would have to go. Could we perhaps meet another time? I made the enquiry sound as innocent as I could, but I was fairly sure she would have left this unpleasant task until the last possible moment, and would be in agony over what to do. It was some small satisfaction to force her into delivering the bad news outside on the pavement, with my taxi's engine idling nearby.

The call to come into the office to be told I had lost my role as the presenter of the
One O'Clock News
came while I was Christmas shopping in Harrods, and the bad news about the
Today
programme reached me in the car park of a hotel in Harrogate, where I had just addressed a literary lunch. Neither of those was funny at the time.

The first hint that the Kudu column was for the chop came when my BlackBerry started pinging with emails at the baggage carousel at Gatwick; one of them was ominously titled ‘CHANGES'. By the time I had got through to the relevant editor I was on the Gatwick Express, so the phone kept cutting out. But I got the message in the end. My broadcasting work had picked up again by then, and when I hung up I reflected that Kudu had, in a characteristically unfussy doggy way, Done his Duty by seeing me through a troubled time, and could retire from literary life with his head held high.

Much to be learnt from taking a dog's-eye view of things

18 September 2010

In one of the earliest of these columns I introduced Bertie, a wise Border Collie with a remarkable command of the English language. His owner, a distinguished QC, claimed that Bertie could always understand the word ‘ride'. However it was used (‘Let's go for a ride' or ‘Let's go riding') and whatever the tone (a shout or a whisper), Bertie would always trot off to the tack room for the treat of a horse-led ramble through the Hertfordshire countryside.

Time has rolled on, and Bertie has passed a milestone. One sad day this summer his master (a judge now, so older and wiser himself) invited Bertie out for their usual post-Sunday lunch expedition. Bertie shook his head and retreated to his basket. ‘Dogs know,' said my friend the lawyer, ‘when it is time to call it a day.'

So does this column. Kudu is retiring from public life, and this will be the last of his regular rambles in the pages of the Saturday
Telegraph
.

His celebrity has been entirely accidental; these columns were never planned. When I lost my slot on the
Today
programme, the
Telegraph
was kind enough to offer me a home here. Had anyone said to me, when I began in journalism more than three decades
ago, that I would wind up writing about walking the dog, I should have laughed. But the experience has been unexpectedly rewarding.

As a civilian dog-walker I always suspected that the dog's-eye view of the world had something unusual to offer. But it was only when I began writing about Kudu's life that I realized quite how rich the canine perspective can be. There is no field of human endeavour – not art nor politics, not science nor society – which does not yield something new when approached in this way.

Some animal behaviourists recommend that if you really want to understand your dog you should spend an afternoon on your hands and knees, watching the world at skirt level and relishing the proximity of smelly feet and decaying odds and ends that have escaped the broom. Spiritually speaking, that is where I have been for the last sixteen months.

Lobby correspondents are sought out by cabinet ministers with secrets to spill and leaks to spring; in the same way a dog columnist is a magnet for those with good doggy stories to tell. Only this week I picked up a cracking indiscretion doing the rounds in Whitehall: some years ago one of my grander BBC colleagues found himself next to Prince Edward at a social occasion. Searching frantically for something to fill a conversational vacuum, he alighted on the
fact that both he and the prince had recently become fathers for the first time. ‘A bit of a shock, this children business,' he remarked. ‘Not to us,' came the royal riposte. ‘We had dogs.'

Kudu has taught me something important about journalism. Keats famously defined Shakespeare's genius as ‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. Most of my journalistic career has been, precisely, an ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason'. From Kudu I have learnt the value of the imaginative meander – sniffing about where the fancy strikes and (if you will forgive the pun) following a lead, without worrying too much about where it will take me. Kudu stories have a beginning and a middle, but often no particular end.

Earlier this summer this newspaper (among others) reported research that suggested dogs learn to behave like their owners. Since Kudu is generally regarded as a well-mannered and affectionate creature, I remarked to my wife that this reflected well on us. ‘He behaves like you,' she said, ‘only in that he insists on having his back scratched and snores heavily at night.'

I like to think that he has also picked up an interest in literary work, so the final word goes to him.

*

You cannot imagine what a strain it has been these past months, providing material for my Master's writing. I know his deadlines, and sometimes I wake up sick with worry.

The celebrity fishbowl is a terrible place to live. I like sitting comfortably upright on the back seat of the car – if I press my nose against the window I can spot the park coming up. But why does that mean I must be described as a ‘plutocratic' poseur, as I was in the most recent column? Of course I pull on the lead, eat sticks and defecate in embarrassing places – that is what any self-respecting Spaniel does.

What a relief to stop worrying about the literary weight of everything I do. When I sniff a bitch's bottom I shall no longer wonder whether it might inspire some metaphor or flight of fancy: it will be just what it is – a bitch's bottom. I can again enjoy the thingness of things.

Yours

Kudu

The
Telegraph
subs, who, by and large, had been kind to my copy, made two surprising changes to this final flourish. ‘Bitch's bottom' became ‘the backside of a passing Schnauzer', which is not at all the same and suggested a regrettable and uncharacteristic outbreak of prissiness or Political Correctness in
the
Torygraph
newsroom. It annoyingly frustrated my childish ambition to slip a rude phrase into a respectable national broadsheet.

And the reference to Kudu enjoying ‘the thingness of things' became, intriguingly, ‘I can once again dwell in the thingliness of things, as Heidegger said'.

Clearly, I thought, the work of a philosophy graduate who feels his academic training is undervalued on the subs desk. Heidegger was a Nazi, and the British philosopher Roger Scruton memorably observed that his most important work,
Being and Time
, ‘is formidably difficult – unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who begins to make sense of it.' But Heidegger is clearly fascinated by such ideas as the ‘jugness of a jug', and he wrote extensively on Immanuel Kant and his concept of ‘things-in-themselves', or
noumena
.

The term is variously defined as ‘objects as they are in themselves independent of the mind' or – in a strictly Kantian sense – ‘the things that underlie our experience' but ‘
are not themselves objects of possible experience
' (my italics). That is roughly what I was driving at (at least I think it is). I do not believe that I have the capacity to grasp the essential bitch's bottomness of a bitch's bottom, but Kudu, I suspect, does. His experience of the world is more direct, less filtered by the intellect. Kudu knows
noumena
in a way we humans never can.

Dogs are aids to philosophy in the simple sense that their constant demands for walks force one to spend time in a way
that is conducive to solitary thought, and in the more subtle sense that regular interaction with another Being encourages one to reflect on the nature of one's own Being. But they are also what you might call anti-philosophers: they have the capacity to exhibit abstract qualities (affection, concern, loyalty and so on) in an entirely instinctive way, without any of the reflection or agonizing that humans like to engage in when we try to decide how we should act.