(This is a picture of my friend's dog, not mine, as you will see.)
I've never really been a dog person. You know, they're just there, being dogs. And I'm just here, being me. And our paths very rarely cross.
One of my first doggy memories is of a little girl racing across the back field at a million miles an hour, closely followed by a barking dog. Behind our back garden was the large back field that she was running across and she was heading in our direction. We opened the gate into our garden and she ran in and we shut the gate so the dog couldn't follow her. In my mind there are quite a few people there, all watching this little girl being chased across the field by the dog. Now that I'm writing it, it seems like a slightly wierd thing to have happened. I'm not sure of this is an actual memory or a creation of my overactive childhood imagination.
My next experience of dogs was when we, as a family, decided to get a dog. My brother was excited and I did whatever he did so suddenly, without really thinking about whether I really liked dogs, there was one there, in our house, yap-yap-yapping. I was about seven and too nervous to speak up but I was pretty scared of it. It was little and excited and loud. I was horrified at its jumpy-loudness.
My brother played with it and threw it things and what fun he had. I stayed in the hallway and listened to them in the front room. Eventually I decided to go and see the new dog. I went into the front room and it jumped for me. I ran away from it and it chased me. I ran around in a circle panicking and shouting for someone to open the door, which they did, and I made my escape.
I did not approach the dog again that evening. The next day, when I came home from school, it had been returned to the shop.
And that, my good friends, is the sum total of my experiences with dogs.
Well, I lie. We had a dog when I lived in Africa but that was more like looking after a child in a dog's body. She came and went as she pleased and very often wet herself while sleeping.
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