Up the garden path

26 April 2008

Jeremy Clarke on his Low Life

Every day that I can, I take an elderly, obese, arthritic collie called Joe for a walk. I take him out because he’s a likeable old chap, and his owner, Margery, is too frail and bent with arthritis to take him out herself.

Margery lives in a house on top of a 300-foot-high cliff and depends on her home help, Edna, who has even worse arthritis, for everything. Edna says that Margery is driving her ‘slowly round the bend’. When I knocked on the door to collect Joe last week, Edna had gone home and Margery eventually answered it. She was wearing a grey ‘hoodie’ with the words ‘Air Patrol. We never die, we just go to Hell to regroup’ printed across the front. I complimented her on it. Edna had bought it for her in Peacocks, she said.

Joe was as usual beside himself with joy to see me. We took our usual route along the bridle path that runs steeply down to the beach. There are places along this path — a particular tuft of grass, the corner of a wall, a gatepost — where he picks up the canine equivalent of his emails. He smells these places with fanatical attention then cocks his leg and leaves a message of his own. I am always patient. By any standards Joe has had a dull and confusing life and these message boards seem to do wonders for his morale. I also have to be patient when Joe wants to try to pass his stool because it’s rarely easy for him.

Last week I was pressed for time and changed our route. At the bottom, instead of continuing along the beach, we doubled back along the foot of the cliff until we were level with Margery’s house, now high above us. On the cliff face, smooth slate showed through the gorse bushes. Higher up, the gorse gave way to trees and then Margery’s garden. It was almost, but not quite, a sheer drop.

Then I noticed what looked like a path tenaciously zigzagging up through the gorse and disappearing into the trees higher up the cliff. Margery has always said that when her husband was alive there was a path down to the beach that they sometimes used. ‘Come on, Joe,’ I said. And we tried the path to see if it was the short cut back up to her house.

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