Dogs

Some time ago, Richard Beck, who writes a blog entitled Experimental Theology (it was a blog I used to read daily at one time), posted a series on happiness.  In one of these posts he wrote that if you're unhappy because relationships seem to pass you by, then there are three things you can do.  The third of these was get...A dog or a cat that lives inside with you. The research is very clear on this. People who have pets, particularly people living alone, are less stressed, more healthy, less depressed, and less lonely. Now, I've known about this research for years but it never really dented my skull. But I get it now after having become a first time dog owner.

I became a first time dog owner when I was 65.  My wife had owned a dog when she was young, but not since, though she'd often talked about getting one. When we were both on the verge of retirement we made the rash decision one day to get a dog.  Apart from occasional issues, such as all dog owners will experience at some point, we've never looked back.  

The other day I read somewhere that a dog's delight on seeing you is akin to the rush a lover gets when he sees his beloved (or vice versa, one hopes!)  You don't have to have been away for months (as have the soldiers in these videos*); being away for half an hour is enough to send our dog into paens of rapture.  And he's protective: he's just raced out into the dark, in the pouring rain, in order to ensure that no burglars or other nasty people are lurking out in the back garden (in the dark, in the rain). To frighten them away he makes a noise like a honking goose. Apparently this is very effective, if what he tells us about this is to be believed. Certainly geese find it effective: we haven't seen one in years. 

We talk to our dog all the time - whether we're at home on our own, or together.  And of course he talks to us.  He has this kind of high-pitched voice (he's a small dog, after all): it's a tenor verging on castrato, I think.  He seems to have a kind of quirky humour - not unlike my own, although sometimes he takes after my wife.  Of course he doesn't have to talk all the time. His tail gives his true feelings away; in fact sometimes his tail seems to be saying something different to the rest of him.  And when we mention the word 'car' he's at the front door like a shot, scraping away, desperate to get out, without a word.  Why he thinks going in the car is all the great I don't know, but seemingly it's an opportunity to get out of the house for a while.  'Walk' is another word that rings a bell in his brain, and he'll dance around the kitchen - often on just his hind legs - with enormous anticipation.  He can understand 'toy', though sometimes he just takes the initiative and brings the toy to us, expecting us to play immediately.  He doesn't have to say a word at that point. There are a number of other words in his vocabulary too, but I won't bore you with them all. 

Since this dog arrived in our house, I've become far more relaxed with other dogs.  I've got a better understanding of where they're at, and don't take fright so readily at them, or bark back at them if they shout when I go past their house.  While I think I prefer smaller dogs - they don't take up so much room on the couch or the bed when they decide to snuggle up to you, and when they leap at you you're far less likely to suffer a major injury - I've even found some bigger dogs to my liking in ways I wouldn't have in the past.  

But it's not really an issue of whether I now like dogs as opposed to previously not being so keen on them.  What I'm trying to say is that there's something absolutely amazing about the love of a dog for its master/mistress.  Disciplined well when a pup, they'll pay you back in spades (and occasionally some other less pleasant options). I would never have credited that a dog could give so much.  I'd read about it, but I'd never known it for myself. We've been blessed as a family time and again over the years, but one of our greatest blessings has been this ridiculous little dog that seems to think we're somehow the elephant’s adenoids, cat’s miaow, ant’s pants, tiger's spots, bullfrog’s beard, elephant’s instep, caterpillar’s kimono, turtle’s neck, duck’s quack, duck’s nuts, monkey’s eyebrows, gnat’s elbows, oyster’s earrings, snake’s hips, kipper’s knickers, elephant’s manicure, clam’s garter, eel’s ankle, leopard’s stripes, tadpole’s teddies, sardine’s whiskers, canary’s tusks, pig’s wings, cuckoo’s chin, butterfly’s book, bees knees and the cat's pyjamas.  Well, maybe not that last one...

And if dogs truly descended from wolves, how did they come to a point where they think that humans are worth their weight in gold? 


*I suggest you turn the sound off with some of them; the spouses ongoing commentaries get a little tedious unfortunately.

Vera and reading

Several times recently we've caught up with the TV series Vera in which Brenda Blethyn plays a rather dour and snappy detective whose team only just manages to put up with her. A sympathetic main character she is not. Anne Lamott, the novelist, wrote somewhere: Nothing is more important than a likeable narrator - he doesn't have to be good, you have to like him. If a friend or a narrator reveals himself or herself to be hopeless too early on, I lose interest. It depresses me. But funny hopeless is different. I have a feeling Lamott would say about Blethyn's character, Oh, for goodness sake, get over yourself.  

It's sometimes hard to know if it's Blethyn's playing of the character that's irritating, or the character herself. Probably it's the latter, and Blethyn, being the superb actress she is, is doing the character justice. (She's based on a character in a series of novels by Ann Cleeves.). However, for me there comes a time in relation to a character when you lose sympathy for them if they're continually whining or driving everyone else up the wall. It takes exceptional writing to produce an unsympathetic character who won't switch the reader or viewer off. The Coronation St writers have done it successfully a number of times, as it happens.  I'm not sure if the general bleakness of the Vera series manages it as well, though in all respects this is top-quality television, even if some of the plots are a bit far-fetched.

We're on holiday babysitting someone's home at present, so I've got quite a range of books with me. I began reading one called Libya, the rise and fall of Qaddafi yesterday, and it's proving very interesting, particularly in relation to Libya's chequered history of being invaded by one major power after another for more than two thousand years. The most recent revolution is only one of several that have taken place in the last a hundred years or so, too. Not an easy country to live in.

I've also been reading a book by Richard Beck called, Unclean: meditations on purity, hospitality, and mortality. It's a little repetitive, which may come from Beck's background in teaching, but it's proving to be well worth the read at the moment.  

Can't seem to find any fiction that I really want to get into at the moment. I had a book to review called The Sacrificial Man, but when it became evident that one of the themes was cannibalism in an urban setting, I switched off, even though the writing wasn't too bad. I'm not actually starved for novels; I've got all the Charles Dickens novels on the Kindle, and in spite of my intent to read more than a couple of these this year I only managed Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities. I did read the new biography on Dickens as well, so that kind of counted. And I read half of Little Dorrit before getting a bit ground down by it. There are still a few days left in the year. Maybe I need to polish off one of the others!

Chocolate Cuttings

Before the Internet came on the scene, I used to collect all sorts of cuttings from newspapers and magazines for use as idea starters for articles.  I still collect these, but of course now they're collected digitally, (even when I first come across them in print), and I use Evernote for this a great deal.  The advantage of digital collection compared to the old print approach is that the items can be searched.

For instance, I was trying to find some items related to chocolate, because I intended writing something about the gifts that available only at Shari's, where berries are covered in wonderful concoctions of white and dark chocolate (with one swizzled on the other) and almonds - see the example on the right.

One of the items that came up in my search under chocolate was this daft statement from a Facebook friend of mine (he used to live here in Dunedin with his family, and go to our church): French is just English spoken with a mouth full of chocolate.   It's the sort of statement he's prone to at times, but this particular one stuck out as saying something surreal and poetic.

Another item was about the artist, Viz Muniz, who hails from Sao Paulo, in Brazil.  In the home page statement about him we're told that he has used dirt, diamonds, sugar, string, chocolate syrup and garbage to create bold, witty and often deceiving images drawn from the pages of photojournalism and art history.  A slightly different approach to using chocolate, one might think.   You can see his work on his website, but the reason I originally kept the information was that he was involved in the making of a documentary called Waste Land, which was filmed on the world's largest rubbish dump where an eclectic band of “catadores”—self-designated pickers of recyclable materials - live.  Muniz collaborated with these inspiring people as they recreated photographic images of themselves out of garbage. The documentary reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. 

A further item was a series of quotes on the addiction to acquiring money.  John Cleese was quoted as saying: If I like chocolate it won't surprise you that I have a few chocolates in my fridge, but if you find out I've got sixteen warehouses full of chocolate, you'd think I was insane. Unfortunately I have no idea where this quote came from.  

Finally there is an interesting blog post by Richard Beck, a sometimes provocative blogger I read all the time for a while, but haven't caught up with lately (mostly because he doesn't use Twitter!).  In this post he discusses the Chocolate Jesus, an anatomically accurate depiction of Jesus hanging as though from the cross, but made entirely out of chocolate.  It's a work by Cosimo Cavallaro.  When originally exhibited, it upset a number of people, but Beck asks the question: why chocolate?   His answers are worth checking out.  Cavallaro is a Canadian-born artist, not a little given to provocation himself.  You can see the Chocolate Jesus on his website (the link is under his name above) along with a number of his other works.