Review: Vivien Horler

People who like Dogs like People who like Dogs – Extraordinary encounters in an ordinary park, by Nick Duerden (John Murray)

Englishman Nick Duerden was a cat person, until he got a dog. He was also, as a result of not being very well, rather reclusive, not helped by the fact he is a freelance writer.

But when you get a dog, you have to walk it, so you’re forced to go out. And then you will meet other dog walkers, and possibly make friends with them, or at least become dog-walking companions.

The dog he got was a Border Terrier which, oddly enough, doesn’t at all resemble the doodle they’ve chosen to put on the cover. I was drawn to the book by the cover, since my own dog, a Border Doodle, looks exactly like that. And when Sofia wants to go for a walk she will sit, looking both accusing and gormless, sometimes with a ball in her mouth.

No matter, in the reading of this memoir I was drawn to Missy, his small terrier, about whom he writes with great affection and occasional exasperation. Missy, who is 13 months old at the start of the memoir, has a stiff wire coat and “the energy of a just-lit firework”. You’ll know what that’s like if you’ve ever had a 13-month-old dog.

Most afternoons Nick walks Missy in the local park, a couple of acres of patchy grass, used as a football pitch at weekends by Sunday leaguers. The dog walkers and the football players don’t like each other; the dog walkers because what the players’ studs do to the grass, and the football players because of the dog poo many walkers fail to pick up.

In the evenings young people congregate at the park, eating takeaway food and drinks, and laving their wrappers and coffee cartons behind.

They also leave chicken bones, which the dogs think are great, “oblivious to the dangers of those bones that get stuck deep inside gullets. The local vet does a brisk business”.

Nick’s wife Elena also walks Missy in the park, but in the mornings before work, and those are brisk affairs. Nick’s walks are much slower, partly because of his autoimmune condition, and because he chats to people, or they chat to him and he listens.

There are some stalwarts, like Benji and his Akita, “the size and heft of a Shetland pony”. Benji, who is usually stoned, is not above asking Nick for a tenner.

There is Pavlov, a Russian immigrant who has been in the UK for years and who enjoys telling his walking companions, at length, of his theories about life. He walks his elderly dog, Dog, often with Elizabeth, walking her elderly Betty. Elizabeth and Nick understand that their job is to listen while Pavlov expounds on why the world is stuffed, mainly because of billionaires, and what he thinks of AI.

There is Keith, who is always dressed in white, who walks with his albino Alsation and a white cockatoo on his shoulder. Nick would like to know more about Keith, but Keith is always in a hurry.

Then there’s Olivia, a young actress hoping to make a breakthrough, Agatha, a West Indian woman who tends to take charge, and Lintang, an immigrant Filipina housekeeper who walks her boss’s toy Poms.

They all have stories, and occasionally Nick finds himself swept up in them. Lintang in particular provides a dramatic moment in this narrative.

But mostly it’s a gentle and touching tale of small ups and downs, told with humour and the insights gleaned from his dog-walking friends as well as the dogs they love.

Near the end of the book Pavlov’s Dog dies, and he tells Nick: “What is life, you know? Is a series of challenges for which we must find a solution. Losing Dog is just my latest challenge… I’m still looking for this solution.”

Nick acknowledges his park companions are people he would never have encountered anywhere but there in the park. They are his familiars, he says, the supporting characters in the slowly developing story of his midlife.

From being a man who was once pretty isolated, the dogs and his companions have given Nick a new, warmer take on life. And for him their meandering conversation “that says both nothing and everything at once, feels… as precious to me as all the gold in all the banks across this confounding world”.