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together, they couldn’t just go and have a walk without me. This revealed a profoundly philosophical bent in these dogs that were not mine, because they had worked out that I had to be there in order for them to be able to ignore me properly. You can’t ignore someone who isn’t there, because that’s not what
    “ignore” means.
    Further depths to their thinking were revealed when Michael’s girlfriend Victoria told me that once, when coming to visit me, she had tried to throw a ball for Maggie and Trudie to chase. The dogs had sat and watched stony-faced as the ball climbed up into the sky, dropped, and at last dribbled along the ground to a halt. She said that the message she was picking up from them was “We don’t do that. We hang out with writers.”
    Which was true. They hung out with me all day, every day. But, exactly like writers, dogs who hang out with writers don’t like the actual writing bit. So they would moon around at my feet all day and keep nudging my elbow out of the way while I was typing so that they could rest their chins on my lap and gaze mournfully up at me in the hope that I would see reason and go for a walk so that they could ignore me properly.
    And then in the evening they would trot off to their real home to be fed, watered, and put to bed for the night. Which seemed to me like a fine arrangement, because I got all the pleasure of their company, which was considerable, without having any responsibility for them. And it continued to be a fine arrangement till the day when Maggie turned up bright and early in the morning ready and eager to ignore me on her own. No Trudie. Trudie was not with her. I was stunned. I didn’t know what had happened to Trudie and had no way of finding out, because she wasn’t mine. Had she been run over by a truck? Was she lying somewhere, bleeding by the roadside? Maggie seemed restless and worried. She would know where Trudie was, I thought, and what had happened to her. I’d better follow her, like Lassie. I put on my walking shoes and hurried out. We walked for miles, roaming around the desert looking for Trudie, following the most circuitous route. Eventually I realised that Maggie wasn’t looking for Trudie at all, she was just ignoring me, a strategy I was complicating by trying to follow her the whole time rather than just pursuing my normal morning walk route. So eventually I returned to the house, and Maggie sat at my feet and moped. There was nothing I could do, no one I could phone about it, because Trudie didn’t belong to me. All I could do, like a mistress, was sit and worry in silence. I was off my food. After Maggie sloped off home that night, I slept badly.
    Six weeks later I came back to work on a second draft. I couldn’t just call ’round and get the dogs. I had to walk around in the backyard, looking terribly obvious and making all sorts of high-pitched noises such as dogs are wont to notice. Suddenly they got the message and raced across the snow-covered desert to see me (this was mid-January now). Once they had arrived, they continually hurled themselves at the walls in excitement, but then there wasn’t much else we could do but go out for a brisk, healthy Ignore in the snow, Trudie stotted, Maggie bit her on the neck, and so we went on. And three weeks later I left again. I’ll be back again to see them sometime this year, but I realise that I’m the Other Human. Sooner or later I’m going to have to commit to a dog of my own.
    Animal Passions (ed. Alan Coren; Robson Books; SEPTEMBER 1994).
    The Rules In the old Soviet Union they used to say that anything that wasn’t forbidden was compulsory; the trick was to remember which was which. In the West we’ve always congratulated ourselves on taking a slightly more relaxed, commonsense view of things, and forget that common sense is often just as arbitrary. You’ve got to know the rules. Especially if you travel.
    A few years ago—well, I can tell you exactly, in fact, it