Paddy, my in-law’s dog, is chasing down a murderous pack of crows stationed on the riverbank. I am not holding him back. It is time off the leash time. His soul is alive. He has freedom of the body and mind. And his mind is anchored on the prize’s nature has to offer.
I mentally shape-shift into his daemon dog spirit. I have a squirrel and play around. His is a happy, contented, uncomplicated spirit on this day of days.
Strolling along the River Adur, it is Man’s Best Friend, and a Man. The Man is in a Funk, a Systemic Lockdown, and the day’s programming is all out of kilter – mind, body and soul trapped down a gloomy mine shaft – looking for the sunshine above the incumbent grey clouds and drizzly rain.
The river is at low tide. The banks of the river are festooned with multiple flocks of seagulls – lords of the sky, and scavengers of the earth – and they are either gathering for a shotgun white wedding or the bait worms.
Walking briskly, on a mission to blow away these Huntsmen-like cobwebs away, Paddy is swerving energetically round my feet, then running to skid gleefully on the mudflats.
My attention is grabbed by a Magpie landing on a fence post. Clearly looking for gold nuggets but finding only Fool’s Gold. It is the same Fool’s Gold I dig up in the Trenches from time to time.
Far from the real deal.
I walk between the gargantuan, hewn concrete grey pillars supporting the spaghetti flyover overhead, and under this man-made monster of a road. I glance at the scribbled graffiti riddled all over the uprights, where in the nearby fields, the gypsy ponies are sheltering from the drizzling rain.
The crunch of gravel underfoot. And the feeling of touching soul to soul, with my main dog Paddy, who has been the beast of burden to my days and nights of sorrows on my rocky road to life’s soulful emancipation.
I wonder how this dog pulled me up by the boot laces, in the hardest of times. He would lead me over the Bridge Over Troubled Water – when I feared the Fall. And always onwards, to the wilds of Mill Hill, in the murky mind broken days of the constant ever-present cold November rain.
Paddy would take up sentry guard duty on the twisted long nights of the long knives – when the Blackheart Man would come armed to the teeth – plundering my dreams with pilloried nightmares of demons, snakes, mad grief, and revolving corridors of Hades Mazes. In the coal face of night. He waited loyally and patiently outside my bedroom door till the grateful dawn arrived.
And today, he is soothing my soul, pulling my heart strings, taxing my mind, and tickling my funny bone.
The inevitable time comes to leash him. To put a collar and lead on his freedom. And he barks his brain grating loudest, spins round me, in ever increasing circles of canine madness, and grins the biggest grin imaginable.
Man’s best friend. Indeed.