The number one dog is not having a good pandemic.
The number two dog is fine. He finds the house unusually full of people, which is to his taste. People, so his small collection of functioning brain cells inform him, mean walks; more people mean more walks, and the aftermath of walks means food. And since food is all he really thinks about, the more people there are around, the more food he will get, and the happier he feels he can be. He fills the intervening hours by either lying on the kitchen beanbag snoring, or in chasing thrushes off the lawn. As far as he is concerned, the lockdown could go on forever, and then a bit. You can almost hear him willing the duty minister at the five o’ clock briefings to close us down further, and for longer. He is, after all, a utilitarian by nature, and seeks to please the greatest number of people for the greatest length of time possible. So long as one of them is him.
But the number one dog sees things differently. Her brain possesses around four times the candlepower of her son’s, and having so many people around concerns, rather than confuses her. For thirteen years, she has been an easy presence in the house, doing exactly what she wants, and getting away with it because it generally conforms to what everyone else wants, as well. Philosophically, she is a cosmologist, mainly diverted by the idea of a life well-lived, and she can take or leave affection as she chooses. Her current problem is not with the lockdown per se, but with a fundamental life event that has changed everything. Five weeks ago, and 156 months into her time among us, she has discovered raw greed. Very suddenly, and very powerfully.
Millie has gone from a lifelong ‘I can take it or leave it’ attitude to food to an extraordinary desire for it. At an age where, were she human, she would be tucking herself into a local care home and thumbing through old Readers Digests in a trim cardigan, she has gone mental about the whole business of nutrition. In the blink of an evolutionary eye, a rabbit in the field has gone from being a source of unattainable entertainment to an essential dietary supplement, and it has altered everything.
Wolfing her own bowl, and then eyeing up Boris’; standing underfoot below the work surfaces in the kitchen which, for the last few weeks, has been the engine room of the house; scavenging sheep and rabbit droppings from the vineyard down the road. So, for the first time, she is now being routinely shouted at, and not just by two people, but by five. She has spent ten years watching her son being shouted at, and had come to the not unreasonable view that verbal abuse was something that only happened to other people. For her, the lockdown cannot end soon enough, not least because it will vastly extend the number of places where she can get on the outside of a bit of junk food.
It is the aggregations of a million personal changes such as this, I think, which will define our country as we slowly re-start.
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