‘If it’s my mother, give me your paw,’ my wife says. The dog places its paw into my wife’s hand. ‘It is my mother!’
T
he new dog is now a year old, and her bedtime habits are firmly established: when I retire for the night I invariably find the dog already lying on my side of the bed, her chin resting on my pillow. At this point I usually push her off, whereupon she will retreat to her own – perfectly nice – bed, or sleep on the bare floorboards, depending on the night-time temperature.
At around five the dog will leap back on to the bed and tunnel under the duvet head-first, stretching out between my wife and me, leaving only her back legs sticking out the top. That’s how things remain until one of us decides to get up. It’s not ideal, but it’s a routine.
The daytime routine is looser. The general rhythm is well established – eat, walk, sleep, walk, eat – but there are random moments when the dog seems to require additional, unspecified engagement, when she sits down next to me on the sofa, places a gentle paw on my forearm and gives me a look that says: we need to talk.
