Untimorous Beastie

People are always asking me where my hugely fluffy and dolphin-smiling Samoyed dog, Milo, is from. ‘Northamptonshire’ always gets a laugh. He’s been a great little traveler from the first, which is probably pure luck, but I put it partly down to his general ebullience. Last April, Ed and I drove a few hours north of London to get the little beastie. We stopped off first at Ed’s old prep school, where he’d been sent from Ireland at the age of eight. It was a Sunday and they now just do weekly boarding, so we walked around the school’s silent rose garden, playing field and pond. I can’t say seeing the place helped me understand its place in his psyche any better, but he was surprised and moved to remember places and things he’d forgotten, and find the new-old memories were happier than he’d thought. Then we went and plucked our white little furball from his own litter and drove three hours home with him on my lap. He didn’t wee or howl or soil himself, or even try to escape, poor little thing. Having no obvious traumas on that journey seemed to set him up to be a good car dog; well, so far so good, anyway.

Milo’s habits are simple and revolting. He is a proper South London dog. For the first couple of months there was nothing on the street he wouldn’t eat; spilt curry, vomited curry, styrofoam, plastic bags, used condoms and cigarette butts. He has absolutely no concept of gastrointestinal cause and effect. The first time he stayed overnight with Henry and his family in Ireland this summer, Milo crept out and gobbled half a gallon of gone-off shellfish that had been thrown away into a ditch down the road. When Ed is old and takes – finally – to warming up old stories for me, he’ll probably not count as a high point in our marriage the three a.m. pool of crustacean-laced dog-sick at the bottom of the bed and me under a pillow saying; ‘It’s too disgusting; you deal with it’.

Ed and Milo have their own funky little relationship. It revolves mostly around dog poo. One summer morning I came down for coffee to see Ed standing over Milo in the back garden, hands proudly on hips as he announced ‘he’s just curled out a three-pronged steamer’. We admired the turd over an al fresco breakfast and then Ed dealt with it. Garden poo is also Ed’s job.

Before Ed and I had the dog’s shit to talk about, I don’t know how we ever whiled away the hours. Quality, texture, main ingredients, frequency and volume. There’s a lot to discuss. In this way, I have, finally, become a little bit English. For a while, there, Milo’s daily rhythm was primed perfectly to require a straining squat precisely as we passed the entrance to the local Tube station at the height of rush hour. This was around the time when he was ingesting rubber bands daily. (Any reader of online gripes about Royal Mail will know a key one is how postmen discard on footpaths the rubber bands that keep packets of letters together. Another is leaving the gate open so someone else’s dog can shit in your front garden.) The highlight of Milo’s shitting career, however, was the party lights.

Early in the summer, we went to what I still think of as the North but is only Shropshire, to celebrate my brother in law’s fortieth birthday. It was probably the happiest day of Milo’s life. There were acres of children to play with, scores of crotches to sniff, bare legs to frot, seventies wigs to hunt down and kill, discarded drinks to finish and the leavings from a whole roasted pig to snuffle around for in the grass. But the best was the balloons. After he killed them and ate the rubber, there was still a flashing LED inside each one to vanquish and swallow. He’d probably gotten through a half a dozen before I was onto him and locked him away in the utility room with his toys.

For a day or two, nothing happened. I mean, nothing. Ed watched fretfully as Milo trotted alongside on morning and evening patrol, and reported back each time that there had been no ‘result’. Milo went on eating, cheerfully and copiously, but nothing came out the other end. ‘It’ll come when it comes,’ I said. As the second of six children and the eldest girl no less, I learnt young to be sanguine about toddlers’ horrible habits and unpleasant adventures, and also that there is never a shortage of wee or poo or vomit. Or tears. So don’t be wishing for them.

All day Monday, nothing. Tuesday morning arrived and morning patrol produced nothing. Ed by now was insisting on texted updates on the dog’s non-existent bowel movements.

(Did I mention he didn’t want a dog at all? And that if we had to have a dog, the last kind of dog it should be was a Samoyed? He still says we nearly divorced over it, and I say he only has two siblings and no idea what a proper row really is.)

Milo and I left the house at about nine o’clock. He ignored the pizza boxes and fly-tipped rubbish at the top of our street. He barely glanced at the female Staffie we passed. (My boy likes a bit of rough.) No tree, telegraph pole, postbox or locked bicycle held any interest for him. As we approached the tube station door, his pace slowed from trot to walk, then from walk to creeping squat. Right between the station’s double doors and the traffic lights of one of the busiest junctions south of the river, he stopped dead and began to yowl.

He howled and he yowled as commuters swarmed around us, sending me death stares at the animal cruelty I was clearly perpetrating. The station attendant lurched towards us and I made a token pull on Milo’s lead. Milo was not for turning. The assembled might of TFL stood back and watched, just as helpless as me. I stood by Milo, poo-bag theatrically at the ready on my raised hand, trying to play a responsible pet owner. Still nothing. The howling ceased, we moved forward a little, then paused again as Milo resumed his lament. The end came fast. A quick dip of his nether regions towards the concrete, a final bloody shriek, and there it was; a shred of bright green rubber and a fingernail-sized LED, blinking gaily back at us in the morning sun.

‘Well done, baby boy,’ I told Milo, ‘Well, well done.’

I was a little hurt for him that nobody clapped.

It was the first of several LEDs, as normal service resumed. It went on for a full week, each party light strobing brightly atop a pile of dung. I phoned my sister and asked if the balloons left over from the party were still flashing around the garden. They were. If I could remember the company that made them, I’d go online to write an, ahem, ‘glowing’ recommendation.

Since then, Milo’s pooing career has more or less plateaued. There was the ill-advised lamb bone (my fault) that ended up costing £200 by the time we got home from the vet, and more recently a small bottle of perfume consumed just before a fifteen-hour journey. It made him smell just as I imagine Peter Baelish’s brothel in Game of Thrones would – semi-nice in theory, but sub-optimal in a confined space when you’ve just made a ferry-crossing in a Force 9 gale. But as I say, in a happy family there’s never a shortage of vomit.

Ed’s convinced Milo’s a quiet genius, but I know the dog’s as thick as mince. He’s been through two puppy schools and is good at sit but still wholly unreliable on recall. I blame the parents.

But if ever a wee beastie did as he was more profoundly asked, it’s Milo. He is the happiest creature I’ve ever known. Everything is unbelievably more exciting than the last thing, for him. If it’s not food it’s play and if it’s not play it’s walk. It’s all good! All the time! He gets me out of the house every day and random people – Londoners, no less – come up to us to say ‘Hi Milo’ and have a chat. Old people, other dog owners, timid children – all of them stop to talk to him. He accepts it easily like a hairy little sun king. Randomers just smile or break into laughter as he trots by. He has a favourite café, meaning he’s the favourite, and lots of dogs he plays with most mornings. And any day, now, he’ll discover sex…

P.S. If you like dogs, or just the idea of them, or just dogs in books, and can get at the BBC iPlayer, download Robert Hanks’ wonderful ‘Dog Days’ programmes just re-broadcast by Radio 4: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0378t4p