In the weeks last year after my beloved Agnes’s sudden, shocking death, I didn’t want to get out of bed. On the day itself, on that long strange driver back to my childhood home, my mother had assured me that I could stay in what had once been my room for as long as I liked, and that I needn’t do anything but sleep. Then at some ungodly hour the next morning, she woke me up by yelling up the stairs: “Your dog needs feeding!”
Looking back, I can see it was just one of the countless things she’s done for me for which I fear I’ve never properly said thank you. By making sure I took care of my dog, she made sure I had to take care of myself. When I most wanted to give up, I had to keep going.
It’s three years this month since Henry Scampi came into my life. I frankly think I’ve been pretty restrained, by the standards of dog-owning columnists, to wait this long before writing about him. I’d had pets before: an ex and I went through a period of keeping goldfish (who surprised and delighted me with their personalities and determination to interact with humans), and another of keeping tropical fish (who absolutely didn’t offer any of that).
Having grown up with cats, though, I felt firmly where my loyalties really lay. A dog-loving friend and I had a tense discussion during a 2008 presidential election road trip about which animal was superior. The only thing that stopped us from coming to blows somewhere in the suburbs of Indianapolis was the sudden understanding of quite how stupid we’d look if we fell out over this.
It was Agnes who’d always wanted a puppy. I agreed, partly for all the clichéd “practice baby” reasons, but mostly as a mark of commitment. In 2021, though, the post-pandemic London dog market was showing signs of the same madness as its rental one. Poodles were going for thousands.
So when Agnes sent me a picture of what looked like a stuffed toy sitting in a bathroom sink with a very serious expression on his face – the last of a litter of cavapoos born a mile up the road, and vouched for by a dog behaviourist we’d seen on TV – I encouraged her to message. Three days later, we were getting a dog. We named him Henry Scampi, because he looked like a piece of scampi, and because simply “Scampi” seemed somehow stupid. (It helps, when a dog is in trouble, to have a first and last name.)
I remember a moment, the night before he arrived, of sudden terror that life was going to change, and I wasn’t wrong. My freedom of movement is restricted, by the need to be home at certain times. Holidays are harder, especially when your sitter did not get the memo that, “How’s Henry?” actually means “SEND PICS ASAP”. On the other side of the balance sheet, though, you meet far more people and get to come home to someone who’s deliriously happy to see you.
Most importantly of all, he means I still have something of the family we should have had. The dog’s most frequent sitter remains one of Agnes’s best friends, who I refer to, with ever dwindling levels of irony, as Henry’s godfather. There is someone at home who cares when I am sad, even if his range of responses does not extend much beyond cuddling up and licking my hand. On the blackest days, there is still a reason to get out of bed.
It’s very possible that, had I not owned my own flat, all this would have been denied me. One of the less noticed housing reforms the government has proposed is to give renters stronger rights to keep pets: barring landlords from blanket bans, preventing unreasonable objections. Whether this will be enough in a rental market with too few homes to go round remains to be seen. Too many landlords see their property not their tenants’ home, and think animals as a risk to their asset.
Regardless of tenure, though, a home should be a place to build a life. Humanity has been keeping pets for longer than we’ve been writing columns about them, or indeed writing anything at all. It’s neither natural nor reasonable to deprive people of that right, merely because they’re not in a position to buy their own home. You don’t need to be a dog person to think that.
[See also: The internet’s superiority complex]
