My wife grew up around dogs, but our family never had pets. We travelled too often to make it practical, but it didn’t help that my dad’s antipathy towards the dog community was pronounced and legendary. Dogs offended his sense of order and he hated the chaos they could cause: the mess, the noise, the licking, the slobbering, the humping, the vandalising and, of course, the pissing and the shitting. If a dog turned up unexpectedly and began bounding across people and furniture, Dad would exclaim loudly, ‘Get that bloody dog out of here!’ even if he was in someone else’s house and it was their dog.
I inherited this intolerance to a degree, but the older I got the more it was challenged by my animal-loving friends, and on one occasion my sister-in-law Harriet just came out and said it: ‘You’re a Dog Nazi.’
I parroted Dad’s line that it was only the badly behaved dogs I didn’t like, and when that didn’t placate her I continued by saying, ‘Look, maybe I am uptight, but if a friend came round and their six-year-old child took a big shit on the hall carpet, and there were no extenuating medical circumstances, I think it would be reasonable to at least be a little dismayed. And yet if I object to an animal running around the house depositing dog turds, which are, let’s face it, some of the most offensive turds in the Turd World, I’m supposed to be some kind of Dog Nazi?’
‘Not some kind of,’ responded Harriet, ‘an actual Dog Nazi. Yes. That’s what you are.’
Though I did at least manage to stop myself mentioning that Hitler adored dogs, it was one of those arguments, conducted in front of friends, that started out as banter, then became uncomfortable and acrimonious and I was left wondering how much truth there was to Harriet’s position.
My initial response was to do an impression of Harriet’s dog on the BBC 6 Music radio show Joe and I were presenting at the time. I imitated her dog’s tendency for loud panting and slobbery licking and also implied a fondness for farting and indiscriminate shitting (which wasn’t at all accurate). Joe christened the fictional dog ‘Boggins’ and for a while Boggins was a semi-regular feature on the show.
Some people thought Boggins was funny, while others found him repulsive and offensively childish and, in an eerie prefiguring of Brexit, our listeners divided themselves into two distinct camps: ‘Save Boggins’ and ‘Kill Boggins’.
At times, the Boggins debate became so heated that it was difficult to know how seriously to take some of the messages we received (examples below, both genuine):
Subject: BOGGINS
although i am a dog person (not a half man half dog) i plead with you to put boggins down as hearing a grown man pretend to be a dog and eat his own poo while licking another grown mans face is just wrong and makes me feel uncomfortable week in and week out. it almost ranks up there with George Galloway pretending to be a cat! STOP THE MADNESS KILL THE DOG!!! ttfn
Glen (Simpson)
This message stung because it invoked one of the most excruciating moments in British TV history when in 2006 the outspoken Scottish politician George Galloway appeared on the reality show Celebrity Big Brother and with chilling enthusiasm threw himself into a task that required him to act like a cat. He could have just said ‘miaow’ a couple of times and pretended to scratch something, but instead Galloway surprised everyone by crawling about in a bathrobe, licking his whiskery lips and nuzzling at the cupped hands of the actor Rula Lenska as she fed him imaginary treats and cooed that he was a ‘Good pussy’, a compliment that made him purr.
It was a moment I had watched with my wife when it was originally transmitted and we had squirmed on the sofa, stood up, sat down, held up our hands to block out the TV and beseeched, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, please, no, no, no, no, don’t do that, no, no, no, no, no, no …’ so painful was it to see another human being humiliating themselves to such a degree while seeming to think it rather fun.
Now, according to Glen, that’s exactly what I was doing by pretending to be a dog called Boggins. I’m a comedian, not a politician, so humiliating myself is part of the job, but as George Galloway showed, there’s a thin line between irreverent larking and cringe-inducing ignominy. Or maybe it’s a big fat line, but Pussy Galloway and Boggins Buckles had bounded across it regardless.
I think a lot of the messages we got about Boggins were intended as banter, but a few appeared to be expressing genuine annoyance:
Subject: BOGGINS IS RUINING IT
Whenever Boggins is around, my hands automatically reach for the ‘stop play’ button.
Not sure why but I can’t stand him and he has been ruining my fun. It would really help if you had a warning that said ‘this show features Boggins’ then I would know that I can give the show a miss rather than stop half way through completely exasperated and frustrated. I have been a longstanding fan but this feels like the end of a beautiful affair and just because of a stupid dog? How could you.
Corinne
Department of International Development
University of Oxford
The final Adam and Joe 6 Music show was broadcast live from the Glastonbury festival in 2011 and it was then that we finally released Boggins into the mud, the filth and the stinks where he truly belonged. I’m told by regular festival-goers that he lives there still, hibernating in the base of the Manic Street Preachers’ private Portaloo all year round and only emerging in June when he smells roadie musk, drug-infused urine and/or Goan seafood.
By early 2013 our youngest son, Nat, then aged eight, had been asking if we could get a dog for a while. I wasn’t keen. With the children a little older and life at home becoming less messily unpredictable for the first time in a decade, I was reluctant to introduce a new agent of random disruption, but Harriet’s upsetting accusations of dog Nazism still rang in my ears. I was also coming round to the argument that taking care of an animal would be good for the children, though I made it clear I would not personally be responsible for the dog’s welfare and had no intention of ever picking up a single one of its turds.
A whippet-poodle cross would be easy-going and not too barky, said a friend. My wife looked online and found a litter of five being sold by a couple in Durham. She chose the smallest one and a week later Nat was stood in our kitchen with the three-week-old puppy in his arms. ‘What are you going to call it?’ I asked.
‘Steve,’ replied Nat immediately.
‘It’s a girl, Nat,’ said his older brother. ‘You can’t call a girl Steve, it’s ridiculous, you just can’t do it. We should call her Rosie.’
‘Who cares if she’s a girl?’ protested Nat. ‘Steve’s a cool name.’ I was about to step in to mediate, but to everyone’s surprise Nat continued, ‘But Rosie’s fine, too. Let’s call her Rosie.’
Rosie was sweet, no doubt. Very sweet. She was as small, soft and light as my daughter’s little black stuffed toy puppy (the distressingly named ‘Puppalina’), but that was where the similarity ended.
Puppalina didn’t get on the kitchen table and eat my scrambled eggs if I turned my back for more than four seconds. Puppalina didn’t leave pools of lurid yellow piss on every inch of floorboard, carpet and bedspread.
Puppalina didn’t drag out and chew each valuable item that was left accessible, including a brand-new pair of prescription glasses with expensive German varifocal lenses, a trendy coat I’d bought my wife in Sweden, which she said was the best present I’ve ever got her, and the first set of headphones I’d ever had that delivered properly punchy bass, smooth mids and detailed treble while always sitting snuggly in my ears, whatever the environment.
If everyone was out of the house, Rosie was left in the kitchen with all the chairs either stacked on the table or ranged against lower shelves in order to prevent further wanton destruction. My wife would leave Radio 4 playing, saying the sound of people talking would stop Rosie getting lonely, but I was concerned that the range of voices Rosie was hearing was not sufficiently diverse and that the political bias she would be absorbing was tantamount to ‘in-dog-trination’ (pfffrrt).
As the months passed and summer rolled round, it became clear that any fantasies I might have had about the children switching off their screens and going off on countryside adventures with their new best dog friend were not about to materialise. Instead (as usual) it was my wife who ended up doing all the work, and after a while my noninterventionist position, though clearly stated from the outset, became untenably arseholish. So one day I went for a walk up the farm tracks and between the fields behind our house and Rosie came with me.
The first few walks were not relaxing. Rosie, desperate to run free, would strain at her lead so hard that she would half choke herself, and a few times she nearly escaped by wriggling her small skull out of her collar. We invested in a harness. That worked OK for a while, but one foggy winter afternoon Rosie spotted a piggy muntjac deer across the frosty furrows of a ploughed field and with a couple of frantic contortions she slipped free of the harness and bounded after the deer, a hairy bullet disappearing into the mist with a diminishing volley of ecstatic yips.
I strode about, shouting for Rosie with increasing urgency as the light went, but when she still hadn’t returned after half an hour I started to entertain worst-case scenarios. These were less about Rosie’s fate and more about my family strongly disliking me and possibly even suspecting that I had deliberately lost her because deep down I was just a no-good Dog Nazi, like my dad.
Then suddenly there she was, loping towards me out of the gloom with her tongue lolling out and her black fur wet and slick against her whippet frame. She looked like a big black rat with spidery legs, grinning. A moment of sweet relief quickly gave way to anger and, taking hold of her skinny body, I roughly reattached the harness, then stomped home in silence as she padded along behind. ‘It’s enough to have my emotional welfare tethered to a wife and three children,’ I thought hotly. ‘Now I have to worry about a dog-spider who doesn’t give a shit about anything except what she can possibly eat or destroy and expects a scritch-scratch on her tum-tum in the meantime? Well, fuck that.’
But that was five years ago. As you know, I don’t feel like that any more.
It started to change when Dad moved in. Feeling that his own life was running out, my father’s former extremism had been tempered by an appreciation for all living creatures. That included dogs, though Rosie was rather wary around Dad, as if she could still detect a faint Nazi whiff. Or maybe it was just the TCP. Either way, it was nice to see a softer version of Dad in Rosie’s presence, as well as being somewhat satisfying to note that her affections were not entirely indiscriminate.
On particularly stressful days I found myself grateful for the opportunity to take to the farm tracks with Dog. By that time we’d decided that it was safe to let her off the lead, and though she would still disappear now and then, I usually got home to find her scratching at the front door. Out on the walks Rosie would bound about up ahead, looking back occasionally to check where I was, and while she gambolled and harassed the rabbit community, I got into the habit of recording voice notes on my phone.
I would talk about how things were going with Dad, my wife, the children, Rosie and work, and often I would get home feeling unburdened and more positive. Sometimes I’d record half-formed songs or jingles – things that a few years before I might have used on the 6 Music show and it made me miss those days. Joe was too busy with film projects to do a regular show any more, but it was on my walks with Rosie that I decided I should have a go at doing my own podcast, and get beyond the fear that continuing without Cornballs in that medium would just be too embarrassingly rubbish.
Instead, I decided I would talk to other people, and without the pressure of keeping things light and funny for live radio I thought the podcast would allow me to talk more seriously and honestly about the various hang-ups, insecurities and fears most of us grapple with every day. I was aware that for some of our old 6 Music listeners this might be less preferable than more reliable silliness, but I didn’t see why the podcast couldn’t accommodate both. Rosie agreed and The Adam Buxton Podcast became a phenomenal success, which in turn led to the commission of this extraordinary book.
To paraphrase the adage, I want to be the person I think Rosie thinks I am, though there are times when I suspect she may just think I’m the person who takes her for walks and sneaks bits of chicken into her food and picks the goosegrass balls out of her fur in the summer and scrubs the carpet when she pisses on it, in which case I’m already the person she thinks I am. I don’t think she thinks I’m particularly nice, or kind, or clever, but if I sit down on the sofa in the kitchen she jumps up and lays her head on my lap anyway. What’s more, when I’m feeling isolated or full of self-reproach, she holds my gaze with her amber dog eyes for longer than any sane human being would, and if it’s not a meaningful connection, it’s certainly a very skilful imitation of one.
