It’s a dog’s life under lockdown

GARRY SCOTT

IT was when the dog was dragged out for her fourth walk of the day that she realised this lockdown business might not be all she had hoped. When she saw her lead, a handful of biscuits and the inevitable plastic poop bag (the holy triumvirate of the dog walker) being shoved into my pocket she didn’t leap up like a hungry hound that had just spotted a tray of sausages with an Eat Me sign attached.

Rather, she eased herself up reluctantly. Stoically even, as if to say: If it will make you happy...

It was fun at the start for her having the whole family home. Lots of claps and treats. Watching them fall over each other, and those annoying cables they had attached to their computers, and their attempts to talk to those blurry little faces on their computer screens. Very important calls, they said. Hmm.

Anyway, out we go. Again. Me and the mutt. When you have five almost-adults at home, under instructions only to go out in twos for their state sanctioned one-hour walks, it adds up to a lot of running, jumping, sniffing and barking.

When we get there, Pollok Park is busy, with lots of dogs and lots of people. More than normal surely.

Maybe people have misunderstood. Maybe they think the one-hour exercise thing is compulsory because I’m sure most of them don’t do that much exercise normally, not to look at them anyway.

And what’s with the walkers who have taken to wearing brightly-coloured sports leggings, fancy-dan trainers and tops made of the sort of technical material Edmund and Hillary could only have dreamed about when they tackled Everest for a dander around the duck pond?

Then there’s the joggers. For people obsessed with distances and miles, they don’t seem to know what constitutes two metres.

Even worse are those who run with their pooches attached to them by a harness. Not to put too fine a point on it but one of the joys of being a dog is sniffing – and you can’t do that when you are attached to some wannabe Zola Budd.

At last, though, the ordeal is over and we return home to the crowded, noisy semiworkplace that used to be our sanctuary.

And you know what? There’s no space for the dog on the sofa. Not an inch. The whole thing is taken up with sprawling humans watching a TV show about mad Americans, murder plots and tigers. Big cats? Pah.

Now where has that lead gone?