21st-Century Yokel

liked to rush up to new people who arrived at my house and greet them, followed me around a lot and was oddly happy on his back, gently air-flailing his paws like a spaniel I’d seen at the vet while I waited for one of Roscoe’s appointments. But in other ways he could never be doglike. If you tried to discipline Shipley, he’d just tell you in no uncertain terms to make love and travel, or begin insouciantly cleaning his bottom. I could craft an argument that he was all the dog I needed in my life. I had never craved a relationship with a pet based on you being so stroppy to the pet that the pet learned to respect you and not act up around you. But that was dogs all over. Like horses, they also had an innate sense of when somebody was feeling especially unstroppy and tended to like to take advantage of it. While walking in the immediate post-dusk light not far from home around the time Roscoe started going outside again I met an Irish wolfhound called Ted who provided a good example of this. Ted – who I didn’t know was called Ted at the time and who seemed more formidable for this fact – had seen me across a field and bounded ahead of his owner, cornering me gruffly by a kissing gate. As he barked and growled at my face, I got the very definite impression that kissing wasn’t on his agenda. ‘I’m sorry!’ said Ted’s owner, jogging breathlessly up just in time to stop Ted biting both my legs off cleanly at the knee. ‘Don’t worry. Honestly, he’s a big softie usually.’ He introduced himself as Ollie and we got chatting. I told him about Roscoe. Ollie told me that Ted too had recently undergone a large and costly surgical procedure, after swallowing a large stick which tore open the lining of his stomach. ‘I’ve got to be careful now in case he does it again,’ said Ollie. ‘We can’t go through woodland any more, which makes our walks quite difficult.’ Ted was now looking up at me in a far more friendly way, and with my new knowledge of his proclivities, I tried to put his earlier threatening behaviour down to a simple case of mistaken identity, prompted by the dark, my largely brown attire and the fact that I am quite thin. But on another level, I knew that Ted knew. He had sensed it from a hundred yards away, across a nocturnal field: I was a person who was nervous around dogs.

But I had a dog in my life who liked me, whose small twangy presence I missed and who I’d been neglecting for quite a long time. It had now been over two months since I’d walked Billy. I’d had my reasons, and I knew Susie understood them. I was also sure Billy’s canine radar would pick up on my newly raw nerve endings. But by continuing not to walk my part-time black dog I would surely be doing myself a disservice: performing a version on myself of what I’d have been doing to Roscoe had I kept her indoors forever after her operation. At the beginning of March I arranged for Susie to drop Billy off at my house and plotted a new walking route on my OS map: an ambitious one which would take us all the way to Dartmoor from my front door, before turning back a couple of miles to the south-west, where I’d deliver Billy back to Susie’s cottage. I could hear Billy’s excited yips from many yards away, and I hurried out to check Roscoe wasn’t around and to warn Shipley of the poodle’s arrival.

‘Get back inside, Shipley,’ I said.

‘Thirty-seven boobs!’ said Shipley.

‘Come on, or you’re going to regret this,’ I said. ‘You know the two of you tend to clash.’

‘I’m giving up wanking!’ said Shipley.

‘Go on!’ I said. ‘Quick!’

‘Total eclipse of my arse,’ said Shipley, skulking off.

Humid Glass Palaces of Dreams

I met Billy and Susie by the gate, and in time-honoured fashion Billy instantly began to pogo up and down almost the entire length of me. ‘I’m sorry, he smells slightly of lamb,’ said Susie. ‘He stole some yesterday.’ I appraised my estranged woollen companion. He was still Billy, and I was still the person he followed eagerly up hills and along cliff tops without a hint of intellectual enquiry as to why it was happening. We said goodbye to Susie and headed out through little copses, newly intoxicating with the first little flush of wild garlic, then along a narrow logging road where all the trees looked like they’d been in a war, before entering soft patchwork farmland where pylons marched in intimidating robot lines towards the coast. A disturbing dystopian hum in the sky battled with a soundless utopian one in the earth. The hedgerows on the paths and lanes were filling up with primrose, yarrow and lady’s smock. I made a quick stop at a small, hidden nursery, in whose greenhouses cheeky blackbirds whizzed through the air, expertly negotiating Australian tree ferns and hanging baskets stuffed with crocus and tulip bulbs. The huge greenhouses in this unassuming place which you’d not guess was there from the road save for its sign sent me into rapture each time I entered them, gave me wild and unrealistic fantasies of my green-fingered destiny. Humid glass palaces of dreams. Lofty unthinkable expansions of the greenhouses of the young, horticulturally ambitious grandparents of the 1960s.

We continued towards Buckfastleigh, where the moor sort of starts, but doesn’t. Gates seemed stiff with winter’s neglect. One of last autumn’s hay bales lay wedged in the fence to the left of one: a downhill runaway yet to be rescued. The fence was strong and had succeeded in halting its descent but splintered and bent in the process. I spent hours leaping from and on hay bales as a kid. One