The Canine Guru’s Guide to Endurance
We’ve all had them, those days when you find yourself sitting on the bathroom floor, toilet brush in hand, thinking I have too much shit to deal with. It isn’t all shit, of course, it’s just that moment, in that day, in that week and it will pass. Change is inevitable. . . Oh please! I can’t keep this up. Some days are just too difficult – end of. When you are on the floor, both literally and figuratively speaking, it’s hard not to moan.
And moan I did, on one of those lockdown Sunday afternoons when the rain was unrelenting in a quiet, post-apocalyptic way. Even the cuckoo had stopped bragging about its arrival from Africa. Who could blame her? England isn’t exactly the all-inclusive destination it once was. My gripes were spineless and spoilt. I wept over the broken boiler (you should be so lucky to even have a boiler, chided my inner adult), I cried because the smarmy scientist on Radio 4 gleefully told us, “Covid 19 is simply the warm-up act. Much more devastating pandemics are waiting in the wings,” (stop panicking, the adult voice said), I blubbed because I haven’t been able to see my ageing parents for a year (along with everyone else, you whinger), and, I shed a tear because the haircut my daughter has given me makes me look like Joceyln from Shitt’s Creek .
(Sorry, said my inner adult, when it had finally stopped laughing.)
This toilet-floor misery was interrupted by the vibrating phone in my now too tight jeans pocket.
“You need to come get your dog,” said my ex-husband. We share Inca in the same way we share the children, who also become “your” children when they have done something less than genius. On further enquiry, I discovered my cockapoo was doing something odd with his face.
“Define odd?”
“Well, bashing it. I can’t see a single thing wrong with him and he’s not crying, but he’s obviously distressed.”
He was distressed! What about me? I needed this precious alone-time to cry, eat chocolate and watch TV that didn’t involve Americans seeing the oh-so-hilarious side of chaos. I had been looking forward to twenty-four hours of Danish psychological thrillers and vicarious drugs and sex.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I said, putting the toilet brush back in its holder.
In the car, I listened to a soprano sing about her imminent death from consumption. It comforted, but the tears still rolled down my cheeks (in much the same way the rainwater trickles from the gutters onto the walls of the house we’ve just moved into). Red traffic lights all the way. Pedestrians glanced in my direction and looked away quickly. A mother shielded her child’s eyes. Don’t look at the sad lady from Schitt’s Creek gripping the wheel; it will give you nightmares.
Just stop! Piped up my inner adult. Marcus Aurelius wouldn’t behave this way. I remained silent, trying to remember this Marcus – was he the kids’ Kung Fu teacher? Or the agent I haven’t seen for a year? You know, the Roman emperor, author of The Meditations, one of the main proponents of the Hellenistic philosophy, Stoicism, who said, ‘Don’t be heard complaining…not even to yourself?’ I looked lost. O.K. How about the former actor, turned author, now famous ‘stoic’, who you follow on Instagram, what would he say? “He’d say, ‘Because of you lot, I’m now incredibly rich and never have to clean my own toilet again’.” I wailed at the windscreen.
The lights changed; the driver behind me beeped his horn and gesticulated wildly over the delayed two seconds of his life. I tried to give him the middle finger, but it was too much effort to turn it around and so I ended up insulting the child, who had just been given the all-clear to look up.
On collection, the guru seemed well, except for the fact he was tapping his cheeks with his paws in a way that was not dissimilar to my behaviour ten minutes before, as I’d stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and barked, “Pull yourself together.”
(Non-dog lovers, please skip this paragraph.) Like a mother and her child, I reached into his mouth and felt around his teeth, his cheeks, even under his tongue and could find nothing untoward. It was odd that he let me. Normally, for such an invasion of his jowls, he’d bite my finger off. No growls, no pulling away. I was about to complain that this unnecessary call-out had ruined a perfectly good afternoon of self-pity, when Inca began bashing his face more aggressively. Something was definitely not right. So, he and I went home to watch Danish dystopia and panic about undiagnosed canine neurological disorders, until the vets opened the next day and could confirm it.
I haven’t written about the guru recently because he has taken the paw off the gas when it comes to teaching anything. During the recent house move and home schooling, he quickly reverted to a creature that ate grass and took joy in throwing himself off tall rock formations, so we could make rushed visits to vets, who spoke of preposterous numbers like, “Eight hundred pounds,” for x-rays that turned out to be unnecessary.
But then came Woodgate.
“There doesn’t seem to be anything actually wrong with him,” I told the implacable, buxom vet the next morning. I mention the buxom part simply because Inca seemed very happy to rest his head there, in a way that I began to find disloyal. “He’s just silent, won’t eat and appears to be boxing a mortal enemy in his cheeks.”
Five minutes later, she and Inca trotted back to me. With a raised eyebrow and disappointed tone, she informed me that Inca was less than talkative because he had a stick the size of an adult thumb wedged between his teeth.
“Right at the back of his soft palate. I can’t believe you missed it.”
An immediate operation, under general anaesthetic, was essential. Inca looked at me as if to say, ‘Shit happens, baby,” as he strolled off again with the vet like Barry White and his new ladylove, who he’d just picked up in Vegas. Not even a backwards glance. Other pet owners pretended not to notice.
After the surgery she told me, “Your brave little man is going to be in a lot of pain. Give him one of these twice a day, for two days.” I was sorely tempted to take them myself. You know things are bad when you are envious of your pet’s painkillers.
For two days he sat in dappled sunshine on the couch, quietly pondering existence. OK, he was off his face on prescription meds, but still, he bore his injury like Achilles. It got me thinking about my endurance levels. Just how uncomfortable can I be before I am moaning? Not just about physical pain but emotional distress over friends, lovers, family, work, sleep. Had lockdown made me less thick-skinned, too quick to comment, to speak out, without stopping to think about how it affects others? I made the decision to be less like me and more like the stoned dog on the couch. No more moaning over the inconsequential, the ephemeral.
“Except this avocado. It says here that it’s perfectly ripe, but that is false advertising!” Inca opened one eye, huffed and turned away.
And yet, while all was quiet and no one was moaning, I had to ask, wasn’t Marcus Aurelius the ultimate patriarch? As Emperor, I’m sure he had no shortage of ripe avocados. That’s just what people in power do – tell others how to live and to shut up if they don’t like it. Dictatorships, and pretty much all religions, rely upon our acceptance.
There are numerous groups in society who have been quiet for too long, but I will focus on the one I am familiar with: women. We’ve been taught to live by the ‘keep quiet’ mantra for so long that we had to be trampled under horses to be heard. Putting up with discomfort is a very English thing to do. As a nation, we don’t like to make a fuss. In fact, we make a fuss about not making a fuss. Add being a woman into the mix and – up until recently – you have a group with a proverbial stick stuck in our throats.
In certain instances, it is vital to speak up, I am glad that important conversations are being had surrounding respect and safety, but if we are all talking loudly, do we end up saying nothing? By that I mean identity politics can just end up sounding like a lot of noise, especially in the hands of the young and impressionable. Excuse me, Whittaker, isn’t this meant to be a light-hearted blog about your dog? Well, it is, but I feel this is something that needs to be said, ironically. There has been much in the press about female safety, rape culture, MeToo, empowerment, vilification, justification, and it has filtered down to our children, who are suddenly forced to deal with very adult issues, while armed with that most dangerous of weapons, social media. When we all have our say about misogyny, it gets churned up like so much cheese and fed to the younger generation, who are snap-chatting, Instagram-ing, group whatsapp-ing in what can only be described as boy bashing. It’s there in the classroom, just ask your kids. I think it’s something we need to be aware of and quickly, before we have re-enactments of the Crucible outside of theatre classes.
How did social media turn us all into vocal monsters, that don’t keep our own counsel for five minutes? We see something on Twitter that riles us and Bam! Here’s a nasty comment in your feed; Ooh look, every arse is bitching at that person, let’s jump on that and be vicious too. Safety in numbers. It’s not the naked selfies we need to worry about now, it is the naked aggression that we all throw out in text as if the world were in a massive verbal punch up.
Matt Haig author of (among many brilliant novels) The Midnight Library, has left Twitter because of the relentless hatred that gets spouted there. What’s going on when we are being spiteful to literally the greatest empath on the planet?
If an issue is ‘stuck in your throat’ and you need to get it out, you must speak up, but isn’t it about time we took a breath – a ‘paws’, if you will – before we start criticising? Either that, or let’s just take Valium and listen to James Taylor. That’s a joke, James Taylor is way too opinionated.
As I finish writing, the drugs have started to wear off and Inca is threatening to howl the house down. I would moan about him, but instead I’ll give him a hug, and here’s one for you lot too. x
