Daisy's Time in The UN
A reflection of family stories and mythology
These competitions are the worst.
At least the training is at a more sociable hour, and it’s not too far from home. We’re also much more in charge of the schedule and we get on with some of the other parents pretty well.
Ultimately when it all comes together, it pays off. You see the spark in their eyes during the heats. Sometimes it’s cuddles and consolation afterwards (though they brush off defeat easily). Sometimes it’s celebrations and a special treat for the winners!
There’s no career prospects from this. It’s all just for fun, but it’s amazing the effort you’ll put in for those you love. To be honest, Daisy never really stood a chance. She came to the sport too late, and she’s not got the breeding for this sort of thing. Neither her Mum or Dad are sporty. They are couch potatoes.
I think the turning point was when the popularity of sight hounds took off. Our baby can give a Border Collie a good run, but is no match for a whippet.
If someone had told me the beginning we’d be doing this for a dog. I would have laughed. But then Daisy is a very special dog. She’s been on a UN peacekeeping mission, she’s worked in nuclear physics and was even the life coach for the first dog in space.
Obviously, you realise I am exaggerating here. It’s not possible for a dog to do all of those things. I’m not insane. These things were done in previous lifetimes. After all, Daisy is a Hindu.
Nowadays she’s more happy lying around the couch on her silk pillow. The collective Karma from her previous lives have added up and now she gets a loving home, a warm fire and an unlimited refills water bowl. Lucky dog!
I know all of this because Daisy has been able to tell us the details (sometimes at extreme length) through her telepathic ability. She can send messages for me and my wife to relay - such as “I’d like some sausages please”, or “I think I came here once as a medieval peasant”.
Well - it started off that she could talk to us both, but my wife stopped because she wasn’t getting the accent right. If you asked me to describe the accent then I couldn’t - but I’m not sure that dogs have the same kind of accents that we do anyway.
We know that none of this is real (apart from our cupboard full of rosettes). It’s a whole family mythology that we’ve built together. And not something we have built for the children, we were doing this five years before our son was born. Perhaps I am insane.
It’s just a bit of fun, really. It started as something small and has now become a long running joke built around our dog and shared only between me and my wife (and some day, my son).
I think all families have things like this. If you’re now saying “not me” then I don’t believe you. Maybe it’s not your dog, but I bet you have pet names for each other. Stupid inside jokes. Things that only you as a family do.
None of these things will have started as anything significant. Maybe it’s your nephew being unable to pronounce your name and now its stuck. Maybe one of your children could never say “spaghetti” and so now you have “Basketti and Meatballs” every Friday.
Some of these things will fade - what was once funny to younger children will come to pass as they age, but some of these things will really stick. Perhaps your cat’s love of fancy dress, or your hamsters secret food critic blog (he’s keeping it in his cheeks to review later) will endure.
This is how family traditions are made. Maybe not the big serious ones, but the stupid things we do that make us the Ward family, or the Smiths of the Joneses.
Next time you are walking in the street, make a note of all of the houses. How many on this street, town, country? And all of them are full of people who have their own equivalent of Daisy. Their own sense of silliness and whimsy tied up in pets, children and family stories. Perhaps the time your Dad convinced you a stone at the beach was a “prehistoric toilet handle” or when he told you polar bears live in igloos.
The veil of anonymity on the internet allows me to let you in on Daisy’s past lives, but there is no way I would talk about this openly otherwise. The British instinct to “take the piss” of those we love and care for means we keep this stuff secret.
We all do it - we suspect everyone else does (I really hope everyone else does) - but we keep it to ourselves.
Sometimes it leaks out though. That’s why I am stood in a field full of dog enthusiasts all waiting to race. I know that everyone here takes their relationship with their dog just that little bit too seriously. Tonight we’ll all be crammed into the corners of our beds while the dogs take the middle.
I realise that I may not be giving off the effortlessly cool image of an essay writer that I was at the beginning of this piece. But we’re all nerds for something and we all attach meaning to those things we love. Whether that’s a dog, a cat, a hamster or (less likely) our brothers and sisters.
I hope that we can continue to be a country of secret-tradition keepers. On the outside, us British may be seen as bowler hat wearing, stiff-upper-lip keeping prudes. But I like to think that underneath it all we are just silly-sausages.