Harry was so scared when we entered him in the Best Veteran category in the Friends of Tooting Common Dog Show that he tried to jump out of the ring, and when he found he couldn’t break free he clung on to me for dear life.
Harry was so scared when we entered him in the Best Veteran category in the Friends of Tooting Common Dog Show that he tried to jump out of the ring, and when he found he couldn’t break free he clung on to me for dear life. He didn’t win, in spite of his extraordinary sweetness and beauty. Harry is an eight-year-old English springer spaniel from Battersea Dogs Home and we got him last December. The trouble with Harry is that he is not quite right in the head. In fact, he is bipolar, and goes through his cycle every 24 hours. He begins the day in high spirits, so happy that he whimpers and trembles and makes a noise like Chewbacca. By 9 p.m. he is guarding the front door to see that nobody leaves. When I approach him he growls with such ferocity that he vibrates. I used to try to goad him into ever greater feats of growling, because I was curious to see if I could get out of the way if he went for my face, but my wife said that such behaviour was childish and irresponsible, so I stopped. We just have to accept that he is a very troubled dog, she says, and work round his issues.
The dog’s not the only one with issues. The other night I dreamt I was in prison and someone told me that Harry had died. I opened my mouth to howl, but no sound came out. Perhaps I am getting too close to the dog. When I sit next to him on the sofa, my arm around his shoulders, my wife says: ‘At last, Stuart has found something he can love.’
What do you do when you break a front tooth the day before having lunch with John ‘Rick’ MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s, Alexander Chancellor and The Spectator’s Freddy Gray? You scream and then you ring a 24-hour emergency dental service. The girl at the number I rang said they could see me that afternoon, and provide me with a new tooth. Blimey. How much? She had a hurried, off-mouthpiece conversation. It would be £260. So an hour and a half later I turned up at the practice. A narrow staircase with threadbare carpet and a smell of room freshener led to the surgery. The waiting room was almost deserted. A young Arab in blue scrubs and white trainers sat in one corner of the room consulting his iPhone; obviously a dental technician. After a few minutes he disappeared. Then the door to the surgery opened. ‘I can see you now, Mr Reid,’ said the ‘dental technician’.
Call me paranoid if you like, but I was beginning to feel jumpy. The dentist looked into my mouth, and frowned. There was a lot of decay; it might not be possible, after all, to do anything today, but anyway a bridge was probably the best bet. So that would be a bit more than the £260, then? He looked earnest and upfront and studied his tariff card. Three thousand three hundred, he said. I was out of there. The dentist wasn’t an Arab, by the way. I didn’t ask him straight out whether he was an Arab, because he might have taken offence. Instead I said: ‘Are you perhaps from the United States?’ No, he said. Greece. He had beautiful blue eyes.
At my toothless lunch, we talked about Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell and Barack Obama — Rick said that some Democrats believed Obama should aim to lose Congress in the mid-terms and thus get rid of the swivel-eyed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi — but I think I was rather more interested in what Alexander had to say about corporal punishment. He said that he’d never been beaten at Eton, but that as a prefect he had found himself in the unhappy position of having to thrash other boys. We commiserated. Sometimes boys were a bit upset by these savage beatings, Alexander said, and told us of one boy who ran away from school after being caned by a prefect, never to return. Poor prefect, we said. What a guilt trip that must have been. I have always prided myself on having been beaten at school, but I have never been convinced by that chap in the blue blazer who sits in the corner of the Richmond saloon bar, his eyeliner slightly smudged, and says: ‘I was beaten senseless as a boy and it never did me any harm.’
I am all for political correctness, but should the libertarian right really have taken such offence at Richard Curtis’s 10:10 global warming film? In the film, various groups of people are asked to help reduce carbon emissions. Those who refuse are blown to smithereens. It may not be funny, but it is a joke. Now the film has been pulled on taste grounds. What a pity no one thought to pull Curtis’s far more offensive Love, Actually.
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