A few days ago, I came back from Ireland on the midday Scottish ferry, then motored east towards Richmond in North Yorkshire where I stayed the night in a very nice, very central and doggy-friendly hotel before driving south to St Albans. I covered the same route that I traversed ten days before on my way to Cairnryan port to catch the Belfast boat.
Being on the road has its discomforts, especially when you are bringing a boisterous young dog along, for whose needs you are responsible alongside your own. I stopped at a few rather shabby service areas en route in order to enable both of us to relieve ourselves out of sight of the general public. A highlight of this ongoing saga was a visit on both journeys to the relatively quiet public toilets at Appleby in Westmoreland where I felt able to bring Hugo (the dog) in with me. He was in doggy heaven as a specialist in other creatures’ urine.
As for food and drinks, on that final trip home I made do with crisps and apples but felt obliged to spoon out plentiful supplies of dog-food to the pooch on a regular basis. Hugo is quite a good traveller who kicked up no fuss on his long pilgrimage, however he insisted on standing up in the back seat all the way home, a distance of 220 miles. He gazed out of the window at the passing traffic in a zen-like state of calm that contrasts with his usual energy.
A handsome Airedale terrier receives lavish attention on a journey such as the one we made. One man in Richmond assured me that his mother had had two Airedales and stooped to receive abundant facial licks from Hugo. Another man fed him incessant treats in the street and told me of the lovely collies he had at home. At the start of the first leg, as I walked Hugo around Peterborough service area in search of a place for us both to pee, a young man stopped to tell me how his own dog was old and not far from death and that he’d love to own an Airedale next time around. Then he took a photo of Hugo and hugged him before heading on his way. I could have told that stranger about the challenges Hugo presents. Scores of challenges.
For instance. In the summer months, we have been visited on a regular basis by a fox who is searching for scraps of food for his/her cubs and some much-needed water. Stunned by the nocturnal presence of an intruder on the lawn he considers his fiefdom, Hugo erupts each time into a fit of barking and can only be dissuaded when I bring him upstairs to the bedroom where, after I have fallen asleep, he proceeds to join me on the bed. And in another instance – a less charming one this time – my partner hailed me recently from the kitchen where Hugo had torn open a cushion from the sofa and was busy distributing the foam around the room. Just a few days before, he had grabbed my newly bought copy of the Radio Times and I found him running around the garden with his trophy. Before long he had torn it into myriad pieces.
The one answer to most such problems is cheese, which Hugo adores. When he has something in his jaws that we want to retrieve, a morsel of cheddar is waved in front of his nose. The thought of exchanging whatever he is grasping for his favourite delicacy is too much to withstand. There is a famous Oscar Wilde quote that goes – ‘I can resist everything except temptation’. It applies to Airedales as well as humans.
