Monday December 7, 2009:

So I’m having a cup of tea and a cigarette on the balcony, watching the rain turn the garden into a brown, muddy pulp, and the cleaner arrives and we greet and meet and she goes through the door and; ‘Oh no, what’s all this paper?’ she cries, over-playing it, as she sometimes does, like when the vacuum breaks, every fortnight, or we run out of dish cloths. And I think; the dog. The dog is all this paper. The dog is responsible for all this paper. He’s been chewing up the Guardian again. But the cleaner has to be over-playing it – I know how much Guardian was strewn in the house, and it wasn’t all that much Guardian because I don’t do all that much Guardian. But the cleaner is tutting and fretting, as if the paper build-up in my hall is about to reach Magic Porridge Pot proportions, so I put down my tea, stub out my fag and sigh my way indoors.

The dog is sitting there, waggie-tailing, surrounded by little white, very clean and very white, flakes of paper. All this paper is not newspaper. Newspaper is not this white. The dog has gone novel. Hardy is my first thought and it’s not a happy one, because if the dog has gone Hardy, which I know was the book at the end of the dog-level shelf, some superstitious switch inside me says that will be an end to my creative writing ambitions. If my dog has chewed up Far From the Madding Crowd, what kind of irresponsible dog owning English Graduate (2.2) does that make me? Imagine the dog was the only dog that had been saved post-apocalypse – the only dog on the arc – and he chewed up the only copy of Far From the Madding Crowd on the arc? It would be bad....

Then I notice a diagram on a scrap of the devil dog’s dandruff – a diagram of an obedient dog, lying down, at the command of a stick-ish sort of man. This is something I have only ever seen in diagram form – the dog never lies down at my command, and I am not a stick-ish sort of man. This is a diagram from Doglopedia: A Complete Guide to Dog Care, which I bought exactly two and a half weeks ago in the shop at Battersea Dogs Home, while the dog, who I had only met that day, looked into my terrified eyes with his own.

The dog has chewed Doglopedia, the tome I have been carrying around in my handbag since that day, reading on the tube and on the bus, panic knocking inside my chest as I scour the lengthy list of mutt-ly maladies, hoping that some of them will implant in my brain, should I ever find blood in his faeces or he eat a toy car or have an epileptic fit. Call a vet is pretty much the solution to each but still, what if, without Doglopedia, I forget to call a vet?

And now I am without Doglopedia, as the dog has ravaged it up to page 43 – in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette, for God’s sake – and some of the pages in between too. The dog and I are without Doglopedia, unless the knowledge the dog has ingested somehow stays with him. We are on our own. From this day on, I will have to rely on the ‘perhaps-ex-boyfriend’s’ frantic Internet fumblings whenever I stumble upon some new, unexplained activity of the dog’s. It’s frightening.

I think the cleaner is enjoying it. Since I only work three days a week and can’t keep my house clean, I know she finds the notion of my being able to care for a dog rather hard to take. And here, she thinks, as she stares at the snowstorm on the floor, is the proof.

In the middle of this, the cat glides in. The cat has a sixth sense for everything in the world but it’s particularly acute when the dog is in trouble. So the cat glides in and looks at the dog disdainfully. He sits by me, frantically scooping up the evidence of my keeping house and keeping dog ineptitude, and regards the dog, silly thing, his tail wagging and his ears flapping, all that Doglopedia knowledge swimming about inside him and here – he just wants to play.

If it had been the cat who had feasted on Doglopedia, he would slink off to the garden, ruminating on what he’d learnt, plotting and planning, preening and purring. The dog’s forgotten it already, even as the words float down his gullet to where they will lodge in his gut, causing a problem that, without Doglopedia, I have no hope of solving. The dog and I are doomed.

And in that moment, sitting on animal level, beside a smug cat and a silly dog, scooping up paper with the cleaner glaring down at me, I wonder if, maybe, the mini-break to the Dorset dog-friendly hotel on which ‘perhaps-ex-boyfriend’, dog and I embark in two days time is such a good idea. I wish the cat was coming....