The Night Train

I think she’s got confused. Again. And now she’s trying to confuse me too. I think she overheard a phrase on Radio 4 whilst she was flattening the clothes and she got that distant look on her face which usually means trouble. Recently, it’s been carpet cleaning and furniture rearrangement but now I can feel her gaze falling square upon the top of my head, sitting as heavily as a bejewelled crown.

In a way, I suppose I’m partly to blame. There was the incident with Tyler the other night (stupid name for a dog), the other two black labs in the forest who jumped me when it was pouring with rain then and having to cross the road to avoid a punch-up with a staffy. The icing on the cake – if you’ll pardon the expression – may well have been the heap I deposited at the entrance to someone’s driveway whilst they sat at their full-length front window no doubt enjoying an after-dinner cup of tea and admiring the scenery. Okay, so that was a bit bad but what’s a dog to do?

So we go out at night. Night training. Etymologically, its origins are probably unrelated to how I came to be being walked in the pitch black. Night train, night training? That’s how her mind works; bizarrely. And here I am, bearing the brunt of it. I’m a black dog, apart from the distinctive marks of maturity under my chin, I’m walking in the blackness. She knows that my hearing isn’t what it used to be (as does the postman), that I can’t see very much and that the little I can see in this darkness is black and white and blurry. Now then, she’s got a pocket full of nice smelly biscuits so I’m not paying attention to following my scent along the pavement from yesterday, I’m completely disorientated. Of course I’m not going to pull on the lead, insist on going in any one particular direction or pick any fights. She thinks the training’s working. She’ll be writing a book about dog behaviour next.