Black dogs

Steerforth, Dickens’s dark and moody fatally flawed hero, referred to that not-quite-afternoon/not-quite-night period of a Sunday twilight as a dreadful, mongrel time of day.  Of course, Steerforth resided in an age when gentlemen spent their Sunday pms indoors in gloomy rooms, watching the sky gradually get darker, lounging on a sofa, and having floppy hair, all key contributors to a gloomy mood in an age when the only distraction available was poking the fire, and even then you had the servants do that.  (Poking the servants on the Sabbath was frowned upon).
In these more enlightened times, Sunday evenings mean ‘Countryfile’, where a gurning twat in a fleece holding a lamb is all the assurance you need that things go better when you’re perky.  For the modern gentleman, thanks to Jamie Oliver, the period of noon to bedtime is spent, if you really know what you’re doing, in the kitchen preparing, then cooking, then consuming, some sort of roast bird, whilst others are left to wonder why your marinade requires two bottles of surprisingly really rather decent Australian merlot.
Churchill fought depression as keenly as he fought the Nazis, calling his gloomier periods ‘black dog days’.  If ever a man had an excuse for being a little very dark blue now and again, it was surely the man leading the lonely fight against a truly evil foe in the darkest days of the war.  Churchill knew then what we all know now, if the Nazis had won, there would be no ‘Countryfile’.  The Nazis famously abhorred brightly coloured fleeces, lambs and perkiness of any sort.
It’s unkind, and unfair, to characterise depression as a canine feature.  Dogs may be many things, but they are not really an animal I associate with not being cheerful, especially when you show them a tennis ball.  In these days of NHS cutbacks, when people are seeing somebody they sincerely hope is actually their doctor via Skype, we’re probably a whisker away from having puppies prescribed rather than lithium as an antidepressant.
The most famous black dog is of course Black Shuck, the Norfolk Hell-hound the legend of which inspired ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’.  Again, not an animal that one associates with depression.  Fear, terror and a tourist board wondering how to turn a folk tale into a plush toy, yes, depression, no.
Indeed apart from humans, it’s almost impossible to think of an animal that characterises depression.  Even that donkey from the Pooh stories has, thanks to the merchandising machine that is Disney, become a beloved toy cherished by toddlers everywhere.  Like all childrens soft-toys, as soon as it’s out of the carrier bag it becomes largely drool, but that’s a sign of affection surely.

Nature Notes - Dogsitting

When I agreed to dog-sit my sister’s sprocker (springer/cocker cross) and springer, my first action was to scour the web for gundog training aids.  The dogs are, it’s fair to say, unrivalled as treat-seeking furry missiles but I wanted to see whaat they could do with something aa bit more interesting than a distressed tennis ball.

There are many gundog training aids, from realistic looking stuffed birds to the basic bean bags that I went for.  The bean bag is designed to let your dog learn how to carry a bird without ripping it to bloody feathery shreds and it’s fair to say that they were something of a hit.  Essentially they are nylon socks that are incredibly robust, with a lanyard at one end.  This allows the owner to pick up what very quickly becomes a muddy, drooly training aid, give it a couple of twirls and then slingshot it across the field with an over-excited dog in hot pursuit.  Repeat until your arm falls off.

The only moment when I questioned whether the bean bag was a good idea was when, after a particularly hearty throw, neither I nor the dogs could find the damn thing.  It was eventually discovered hanging from a tree branch.  Obviously, if it had had a treat sewn into the lining, the dogs would have been on it in an instant.

It’s not that they are greedy, although they can sometimes appear to emulate Greyfriar’s Bobby in their unswerving devotion to sitting beside the kitchen cupboard where their treats are kept (much in the same way that I will linger near a beer fridge), but they are proof positive that food can be used as a training aid.  In this case, they have both learned where the smacko’s are kept.

The golden rule of throwing the dummy was never to toss it anywhere where you couldn’t see it land.  The dogs are tenacious in their pursuit of the dummies and won’t let small things like ponds, or sudden drops , put them off.

There is an art to throwing the dummy, and an art to getting the damn thing off of the dogs once they have retrieved it.  This involves just the right amount of cajoling and shouting and, if all else fails, bribing them with a treat.

Now all I need to find is a fluorescent pheasant and the dogs will be ready for action.  With advances in GM food being made the way they are, I’m confident I won’t have long to wait.

Postcard from Norfolk - Drink up

'Boat on Cley beach'  The right light, the right angle, a right old pain in the arse getting this shot.

My tip - support the local economy and buy one of the many postcards available with this shot...

but better.

Every year you read about some poor chap who is drowned trying to save his dog after the dog decides to go swimming.  As one of the dogs ran into the surf and suddenly found itself out of its depth, the headline ‘Heroic dog rescuer mourned’, together with a picture of the canine in question sitting on my gave looking properly mournful, flashed through my mind as I started to take off my jacket.  I needn’t have worried as the next wave deposited the dog safely on the shingle, while I wondered if anyone else could hear my heart beating as loudly as I could.

Once my hands had stopped shaking, I set about trying to take the perfect photograph of an upturned boat.  This is apparently easy, as there are many galleries showing variations on this image in just about every visual medium available up to and including modern dance.  My conclusion is that getting a decent photograph is a lot harder than it looks.  You have to wait for the right light, not easy when you have to keep one eye on a dog apparently intent on doing a Reggie Perrin, and you have to find just the right angle, which is, let me tell you, hell on the knees.

After such exertion the place to relax is the marvellous ‘Lobster’ in Sheringham.  Sheringham had just finished celebrating some sort of festival related to World War II, and many of the buildings had bullet holes painted onto them, it was as if the Arab Spring had happened in Norfolk, but with more booze.

The pub itself is an interesting place.  You walk in and there’s a spaniel sitting looking at its owner eating and thinking that maybe, just maybe, this time things will end differently and chips will be involved.  It’s also rather vast, and on different levels, but at the same time cosy.  Best of all, despite the latte and the food, it’s a proper boozer, where men can go in the middle of a long day for a sustaining pint.

I bet it bloody rocks in the evening.

White van passengers

Standing by the side of the road, waiting for the lights to change, one has plenty of time to survey ones surroundings. But sod that, it's much more fun to stare at the occupants of the cars whizzing by. Someday, somebody is going to author the definitive spotters' guide to the British diver, with descriptions and illustrations of the School Run Mum, The Commuter, The Angry Man, The Fun Car Driver, The Soft Toy Farmer and so on and so forth. Next month, they'll start work on updating the guide, that's how definitive guides work.

A particular sub-set of traveller is the white van driver. Lots has been, well, not so much written as said about white van drivers. True, the vast majority of it is not social commentary in the formal sense, but rather along the lines of immediate feedback on the white van driver's skill at, say, filtering, usually delivered by somebody in a neighbouring car to an audience of an empty passenger seat.

And while much has been said and shouted about the white van driver, less has been said about the white van passenger, which is a shame. Because I think this is a particular social type that could stand some examination. Looking at white van passengers, you can't help but think that there is a story there. They occupy a special place, and not just to the left of the hand break. Rather, like the girlfriend of a a provincial gigging DJ who keeps other women away from her man simply through the power of sullen glower, they have a purpose of their own. Often, of course, this will be to load and unload crates of fanta, but there's something else going on there too.

The passengers essentially break down into three types; mates, girlfriend, family. Mates are there to help shift stuff from the van or to the van. A mate can be identified not just by posture - they are happy to sit in companionable silence for long periods - but by the little nest they make on the passenger side of the van to reinforce their sense of identity even though they are not the driver. The base layer is constructed of coffee cups and tabloid newspapers, further than that it's at the discretion of the mate except that before the invention of the Internet there would always be at least one soft core porn mag.

The girlfriend is rarer, but easily visible when present because her posture manages to convey 'I want to spend more time with you and if I have to spend Saturday in a van with you, I will, although it will not be pleasant'. The van driver's originally chirpy mood will be ground down throughout the day, turning very bleak indeed when he realises about three o' clock that his planned evening of drinking cider with his mates is unlikely to happen.

The family member is about the best. Specifically, small boys and dogs. Small boys, or girls, in a van are always uplifting. Somehow taking your kid to work in a van goes beyond the normal 'I have fucked up the child care arrangements, again' that typify the appearance of a child in an office. The kid is normally excited beyond even the power of haribo to induce giddiness, because they are finding out what happens to their parent during the day and, when you're a kid, there's nothing quite like seeing your parent at work and realising that other people do not call him 'Dad' and riding high above the rest of the traffic. You conclude the day learning that his name is either 'Geoff' or 'wanker'. You also conclude with a free tray of fanta but you're not to tell anyone.

The only family member more pleased than a child to ride in the passenger seat of a white van is a small dog, usually a terrier, usually with its head stuck out of the window looking happy beyond reason because surely there is no greater thrill than accompanying your dad on a job, unless it's sticking your head out of the window and letting your ears blow about in the rush of wind.

Big Society and Dystopia repost

Growing up, those twin essential devices from stopping healthy developmental play in the fresh air; foxed-to-the-point-of-badgered library books and terrifying BBC children’s drama, provided essential preparation for what to expect from the dystopian future.

If you read the books of John Christopher, dystopia came in the form of some sort of disaster that set technology levels back to those of the dark ages (alien invasion, mankind tinkering with nature, everyone on the planet simultaneously joining Civil War re-enactment societies, that sort of thing), while the BBC’s Bleak Future was essentially far muddier then the present, being a place where the appearance of a steam engine was greeted with exactly the sort of slack-jawed mixture of fear and awe currently on the faces of the kiddies being traumatised by this tea-time apocalyptic drama, filmed in the West Midlands to save money.

The drama conveyed to kiddies with some style that when they grew up there would be more chance of them being a subsistence farmer than a spaceman* and, most brutally of all, ‘Angel Delight’ would no longer existed.

What was never predicted (along with mobile ‘phone ring tones so irritating it makes you wonder if perhaps the plot of some of these stories: that advanced technology is jealously guarded by a social elite or at least people with taste, is not in fact a good idea) was the solution proposed by politicians to head off a future where the fabric of society is as ragged as a pair of Primark pants after a boil wash: the Big Society.

The Big Society is not, as you might think, Brobdingnag, but rather a model for the future of community services. Essentially funding is slashed for supporting council services and the people who rely on those services are told to ‘get on with it’, much in the way the same phrase is used when you are locked in your study with a bottle of scotch and a service revolver after you have lost a rather important battle or, worse still, committed social suicide by tonguing an unsuitable minor royal.

The Big Society suffered a set-back this week when Liverpool Council announced that they didn’t want to be considered part of the pilot for an idea thought up by posh boys, but instead were quite content to continue to be considered as a city of lovable rogues, chirpy female flatmates or, of course, lesbian patio-layers (might be getting that last one a bit confused).

A ‘pilot’ by the way is where you don't have enough confidence to roll out an ill-conceived scheme nationally and so do it in a few backwater areas. So, when it bombs like a fat kid jumping into a swimming pool, you can explain that either the idea needs work or the bloody yokels in charge of the pilot couldn't be trusted to run a car boot stall, never mind a complex social experiment and anyway, next time the posters will be better).

The gist of the Big Society is that English people, who by tradition would all like to live in castles with moats far from any neighbours and by practice only really talk to their neighbours if they are caught dumping their garden waste over the fence, are supposed to take a community approach and look after things like keeping the streets tidy and, no doubt when the cuts to public services really start to bite, other jobs currently undertaken by trained professionals including; maintaining parks (we can graze our sheep on them when we're all reduced to subsistence farming), health care (who needs doctors now we have the internet - what's easier, seven years at medical school or Googling 'tickly cough'?), or air traffic control.

What certainly won’t be needed are civic poo scoopers. This is thanks to the invention of the doggie bag. Certainly not to be confused with a device used to transport expensive leftovers from a restaurant (itself an alien concept to anyone brought up to believe that not scraping the plate at the Berni Inn until the last morsel of food, and quite a lot of the pattern, was removed was a sin), but a bag full of Scoobie Poo. Thanks to resilient, hole-free (and that’s important), plastic bags, owners of defecating hounds can now swoop with the speed of a cockle-picker racing the tide and simultaneously bag the unthinkable and make a mental note to stop feeding Fido leftover masala.

*Ironically, this is true, if by subsistence level farmer you mean owner of a boutique farm in the Cotswolds producing some sort of organic cheese and pork scratching smoothie concoction that is perversely popular in Japan, sells for a fortune at farmers’ markets and has just been picked up for national distribution by Waitrose.

The wet nose of the law

I've seen enough teevee programmes with titles like 'police, camera, beating', 'cops 'n' cars', or 'you're nicked scum' to know that if an officer asks you something you don't make a run for it and hide in a dustbin (thermal cameras will find you), you don't try and hit the policeman (CS gas) and you don't answer back (taser).

I have also seen a documentary about police dogs. These come in two flavours - Alsatians who do 'crowd control' (a dog is snarling at exactly crotch level - do not antagonise) or the rather dopier sniffer dogs, usually spaniels, who are trained by sniffing out treats and so look wildly happy whenever they find some bloke with semtex or smack down their pants.

However, I love dogs, especially gundogs and spaniels in particular are a family favourite.

Which is why, when I was walking through the station past a half dozen policemen and their sniffer dog, and the dog came up to me with his tail going wildly, my natural reaction was to lean down, ruffle his ears and say 'hello!' In that special 'talking to dogs' voice.

His handler was not amused. Apparently it's not the done thing to fondle an officer's ears when they are on duty, especially as the dog loved it and the tail started doing even faster.

His handler, rightly assuming that I was unlikely to be capable of carrying enough drugs to elicit that sort of response from the dog, growled 'just keep walking' and I strolled off with that 'just patted a dog, feel pretty cheerful' feeling, while pondering if my trousers might have the same chemical signature as crack. Or bacon.

Man’s best friend in show

Hats, gloves and vest-tops off to whoever commissioned the apogee of reality cop show; ‘send in the dogs’. As with previous shows featuring the long arm of the law (spraying a crim with pepper spray while simultaneously tasering his ass one hopes), the title says it all. Tune into ‘Cops’ and you know it’s not going to be another freaking cookery programme. ‘Chopper coppers’ had cops and ‘copters. ‘Worlds wackiest police chases’ had hey-ho so-so footage of rednecks being chased, but was redeemed by the occasional fatal shooting at the end. ‘Send in the dogs’ is about coppers with mutts (not WPCs).

It’s sensational! If your idea of entertainment is an hour of footage of some scumbag criminal trying to back up against a brick wall so hard his buttocks are in danger of actually burrowing into it, while a barely-restrained German Shepard snarls and snaps at him inches from his throat, then this is the show for you. I watch it with the sound down and the Rolling Stones playing loud!

Now and again they show the cuddlier side of things, with spaniels brought into houses full of chavscum. The scene goes something like this:

Police: are there any drugs in the house?
Chav mum, surrounded by rainbow chav brood, smoking: Naw!
Dog: Woof! (Searches house in seven seconds, wags tail at kids cuddly toy.)
Police: There’s a half kilo of heroin in this teddy bear. Care to explain?

Suffice to say, there’s a reason that these criminal geniuses reside in dilapidated council flats and not in secret underwater volcano lairs complete with henchmen and monorails. Likewise when they do a search at a tube station and the dog goes wild when some random bloke walks through the turnstile.

Police: Any drugs on you?
Bloke: No.
Police turns out blokes pockets. Drugs are found.
Bloke: Oh, yea.

Which begs the question does smoking pot make you criminally stupid, or are pot smokers dumb to begin with and just toke a little to quell the feelings of inadequacy – for instance being outsmarted by a dog.

And while some dogs are smart, most are, lets face it, just about what you’d expect from an animal. The other morning I saw a sausage dog on the train platform, waddling along with its owner on a leash. It gave me one of those little surges of joy that you experience when you see such things, like seeing a flower pushing through concrete. It’s the opposite of that feeling of useless sorrow that one feels every time one turns on the news.

This sausage dog was wagging its tail so hard it was in danger of doing damage to its spine – what makes a dog so happy? Perhaps it’s just the positive attitude of an animal living its life at ankle level has to have to survive – maybe there’s things to be experienced at street level that we have no ken of, and certainly dogs are well equipped to experience it, being in my experience strangers to disgust. ‘Hey, what’s that, it’s, yes, I believe it’s a fresh turd – I wonder if it tastes any good, hummmn, munch munch. No, that’s quite disgusting – better sick it up. Retchhhhhhhhh! Ah, that’s better. You know, it tasted just like the last hundred turds I ate, disgusting, but you never know…hey, there’s another one, now this one might taste lovely. Let’s see.’ You have to admire that kind of enthusiasm, seen only in the animal kingdom and the singles scene.

Of course some people rely on animal intelligence. The other week I saw a guy with his guide dog – nothing unusual there, except he was telling it off by swearing at it. Telling your adorable looking labrador that he’s ‘being a fucking pain’ is a pretty bold move, especially in a train station, where his next conversation with his dog might go something like ‘okay boy, are you sure this is platform 4, because it feels awful funny underfoot, almost like a rail, and if I didn’t know better I’d say that sounds exactly like a goods train locking breaks at 90mph and heading right towards me. Boy? Boy?’