COVER STORY

After a painful break-up, actress and comedian MIRANDA HART feared she might never find ‘the one’ – until a cheeky pooch named Peggy came into her life

Actress andomedcian Miranda on how her puppy Peggy helped to mend a obkren Hart

The extract you are about to read comes from a book that I have written TWICE. In October 2013, I was getting ready to go to a nephew’s sixth birthday and then on to a small surprise 40th. As I was leaving I looked at my dog. She gave me the classic ‘please don’t leave me alone here’ eyes, the eyes that somehow manage to convey deep vulnerability and sorrow, but also a distinct undercurrent of threat. The eyes that say, ‘If you leave me here alone I will, within five minutes, expire from longing and grief like a Victorian orphan. But on the way out I might somehow find the energy to destroy your curtains. Just saying.’ I had no choice but to take her with me.

As I opened the front door I was stopped in my tracks. I looked back at the laptop on the kitchen table and a voice said, ‘Take the laptop.’ I just assumed it to be that stressy unnecessary voice of mine. You know, the voice that says you should worry, even though you unplugged the toaster and put it in the fridge for safekeeping, in case it might escape and plug itself back in and toast everything you love.

I returned post-midnight after a fun-fuelled day, opened the front door and…chaos. The place had been tipped upside down. I had been burgled. I was winded with shock and even more so when I realised the laptop had gone. As I was jumping up and down close to tears, the police made their way in. ‘OFFICER, YOU HAVE TO GET MY LAPTOP BACK – IT’S ABOUT MY DOG!’ Shaking him and biffing him on the shoulders was probably not a good idea. The police were excellent in every way but, of course, did not understand the urgent loss of a book, one that (stupidly, as I am an idiotic technophobe) wasn’t backed up. And as I cried – all night, really; I couldn’t stop – I wondered whether I was overreacting. I still had my health. I still had a roof over my head.

As dawn broke after nil sleep, I realised that the reason for my grief was because they had stolen not a great manuscript the world couldn’t be without, but that most treasured commodity: my time. I was grieving missed moments I could have had with friends and family instead of being chained to my computer. I never got the laptop back. I had no time to rewrite the book in 2014 or 2015, but I have rewritten it now because I don’t want those burglars to have won. Plus I remember what it was about – simple but important life lessons from a small dog I wish to share. So here we go. Take two.

I was introduced to Peggy, a shih-tzu/ bichon frise cross, in 2007 on the set of a sitcom I was in at the time, Lee Mack’s Not Going Out. Peggy, her mother and her siblings belonged to the lady who made the costumes for the show and, my goodness, you can’t even begin to imagine the cuteness. I found myself spending more and more time with her. I could most often be found crouched over her