It’s a dog’s life in lockdown – and Lola is loving it

DOGS are mostly having a good Covid. Ours certainly is. Lola has gone from being a cuddly pet who simply brightened up our lives to being at the very heart of the family. Knows so too.

It’s not that we formally welcomed or encouraged her. But one day – I can’t be sure which one – she seemed to have bestowed on herself all the rights and privileges Homo Sapiens Coughlanis took for granted.

Things like which couch she sprawled on, bed she dozed on, what food she ate, and what company she kept.

Lola no longer takes it as a given that she lives in the kitchen, her traditional place of domicile, while the rest of us go about our business elsewhere.

Now, if left on her own for prolonged spells, she whimpers until liberated and can join the rest of us in our world. She refuses to miss out.

During the day she likes to wander from bedroom to bedroom, following whatever meagre sun this time of year offers.

During the long evenings she insists on the best seat for Operation Transformation or The Crown (a committed Corgi-ist).

She only reluctantly eats the expensive nourishing food we buy for her as a last resort and instead hangs around the dinner table waiting for tasty morsels. Except Lola doesn’t see them as treats. More her staple diet. Her due.

When she doesn’t get them she makes undog-like sounds, more like a human with something to say but can’t get the right words out. Like a drunk in the back of a taxi trying to mumble the directions home.

I even wonder sometimes if she actually thinks she is human because she has spent so much time in our company over the past 10 months.

Before Covid we were out for long stretches and Lola was her own best company. Now she has a choice of family to follow and mimic every single day. That’s a lot of human for one small dog.

Lola does occasionally sniff around passing dogs on her daily walk, but she seems to treat them all with an indifference verging on contempt. As if she’s not one of them at all.

All other dogs seem beneath her even if most of them – Lola being a scruffy little Yorkie – look down on her.

I have seen her scowl at her own reflection in puddles unaware, I’d imagine, that the hairy creature staring back is herself.

She rarely even bothers to bark at the postman any more, probably thinking that the job should be rostered between us all.

It makes sense, really. If Lola spends all her time with humans it’s only natural that she would, as part of a midlife crisis, perhaps, eventually think she is part of their tribe.

There is little in the Google-sphere of canine psychobabble to support this theory. Science is witheringly dismissive. Lola, I suspect, would disagree.

How one minority ‘kept warm in a cold house’

THE centenary commemorations around the revolutionary period are a useful way of illuminating the past so as to better understand it. But they seem to have familiar blind spots.

For instance, the unionist experience in the south still seems to be on the very margins. I’m just catching up with Protestant and Irish, a collection of essays on this minority’s experience in the independent Ireland that followed. Edited by Ian D’Alton and Ida Milne, it looks at how this ever-shrinking minority got by.

Roy Foster once remarked Irish Protestants were “experts at keeping warm in cold houses” and so they muddled through.

A fascinating glimpse at just how they did that.