When the nutter chomps like a champ

IT is crunch-time. That has become overwhelmingly apparent. To such an extent that I witness it, hear it, see it, every time I go out for a walk.

No, I’m not talking about the nonsense in Westminster - even though that is obviously building up to one hell of a crunch-time. Indeed, I was going to write about it, but a friend advised me that taking potshots at this time might not be the wisest thing to do, given the angry mood of the nation.

He was right. I watched BBCQuestionTime on Thursday night and it seemed the audience was split right down the middle. Good, decent people were certain of their opinions one way - and good, decent people were totally convinced the other.

I am certain my stance on Brexit is the logical one - but your completely opposing take on the matter will be equally real and genuine to you. I’ve never seen this kind of polarisation before, and it is all very worrying - in a Berlin 1934 kind of way. I cannot see how it’s going to be resolved.

So I’m going to write about my crunch-time - or rather the one enjoyed by my dog Finn…

It is the best season I can remember for cobnuts. Our lane is filled with the ones that have dropped from hazel trees - much to the delight of this crazy lurcher.

Crunch, crunch, crunch… That is all I hear nowadays when we go for a walk. He’s like some mad dark hairy sheep, grazing without hesitation as we stroll up the road. He devours nuts in the same way that a greedy kid scoffs Smarties. He can’t get enough. Finn is a true born nutter.

He’ll spit out the hard shell once he’s crunched it to reach that sweet nut. But you can hear the crunching 100 metres away. God knows what it’s doing to his teeth.

I’ve never seen a dog eat raw nuts from a tree before. Not in this obsessive way. My theory is that it’s something to do with Finn’s love for hunting grey squirrels. More than anything else, he loves to chase the little pests even if it means he has to eventually stare, forlornly, upwards when they escape up a tree. Which they always do.

So I reckon that Finn has figured out if he can’t eat his enemy, he will consume their favourite food. There won’t be a single cobnut left in the valley if he keeps this up. I have seen those angry squirrels squawking with rage from the branches as this crazy canine chomps his way through their harvest below.

“You think you’ve got the better of me - but my plan is to starve you beggars out…” is what Finn is saying.

Not bad, for a dog-of-very-little-brain.

I relate all this because the thought struck me how funny, eccentric and complex we humans are - as the Finn-eats-nuts scenario portrays. Because it is an example of the kind of totally irrelevant and unimportant kind of thing that can slowly loom large in a person’s mind.

When I first saw him devour a cobnut I thought: “Wow! That’s odd. How did he know that tiny hard orb lying on the road might contain something worth eating?”

But after a week of watching him graze like a sheep, the whole Finn-isa-nutter thing has begun to obsess me. Albeit in a mild and vaguely humorous way.

It’s reached the point now when I have changed my own habits just so I can watch him attack the bumper harvest. I don’t normally walk the dogs on the paved lane, but now can’t stop because it fascinates me to see the looney lurcher chomp like a champ.

And it strikes me that we all have minuscule moments of fascination that are so trivial and unimportant in our daily lives, we don’t even bother discussing them with friends. For us they are very real and apparent - but no one else in the world knows they are even happening.

Equally, we become fascinated by - and emotionally involved with - the really big important things that appear on the evening news. Things that everyone knows about. At the moment Brexit and the far greater problem of climate change are all over everything and are everywhere. We cannot escape them. We take them to bed with us so we can wake in the early hours and worry about them.

So what I have come to think is this: not only are we the ape that learned to stand upright and talk and evolve an imagination which allows us to picture stuff that isn’t even there - we are the ape that watches, witnesses and observes. We are so brilliant at doing this, we can take in both the tiny minutiae of life and the momentous stuff.

What most of us are not very good at doing, though, is taking any action over the stuff we see.

We chuckle over a dog that eats nuts and groan over a parliament that is going nuts. But maybe I should stop the dog before he breaks his teeth - and perhaps I should stand up and be counted in the politics of our country.

The problem for most of us mere mortals is that we observe stuff and feel some kind of emotion, then somehow feel powerless to act. That, for better or worse, is the human condition.

“We chuckle at a dog that eats nuts - and groan over a parliament that is going nuts”