‘No dog of mine will sleep on my bed,’ I swore, before Dennis came along. People who allowed dogs on their beds were feeble, I believed, not far removed from the sort of parent you overhear in restaurants saying: ‘Persephone, if you do that again Daddy’s going to get jolly cross.’ I’d be more disciplined. My dog would sleep in the kitchen, like any self-respecting normal dog.
Dennis arrived, just ten weeks old, and on his first night was duly shut in the secondhand crate I’d bought on Facebook Marketplace for £20, from a woman who owned a mastiff called Hades. This crate was in my kitchen.
Might my single status and attitude towards dogs on beds be somehow correlated, I hear you muse
I went to bed and tried to ignore the pitiful mewling. Guess how long I lasted? Twenty minutes, if that, whereupon I caved and lugged the crate to my bedroom. Over the past two years, Dennis has since graduated from the crate to a dog bed in my room, to my bed, where he now lies every night, on his back, legs akimbo, like a weary Casanova after a long day at the coalface.
It’s companionable, I tell people defensively. I’m single and I like the bulk of a small terrier against my leg at night. Better Dennis than the bulk of certain ex-boyfriends. He’s not under the duvet. That’s my hard line (unlike my friend Hannah, who allows her whippet under the cover, between her and her other half). But he’s up there all the same, his bottom sometimes perilously close to the pillows, settling down when I turn off the bedside light with a contented sigh. There isn’t much fidgeting, unless he hears a fox in the garden but, again, I’d take the occasional growl over the Panzer-like rumbling of a middle-aged man.
