A sad day when your own dog won’t walk with you!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

I’ve just been rejected by my own dog. Was there ever a sadder sentence? I’m not guilty of any acts of cruelty or deprival. If I’ve erred in any way on dog ownership it’s towards being a soft git with her, but there’s a reason for that.

When the IVF failed we knew we needed an extra heartbeat in the house, and after many moons searching for the right soul, we adopted Lady from the wonderful people at madra.ie.

Introducing our pooch to friends, the Snapper declares that Lady is our child-replacement dog, and although we fully understand that all three of our lives will be happier as long as we treat her like a dog, it’s hard sometimes to switch off the nurturing urges inside us.

This morning I woke to a perfect dawn. Frost was melting, the sky slowly revealing itself to be cloudless as the mist rose from the earth. I read in bed for a while but then could wait no longer, eager to be out there.

Lady and I were off to the do The Double, our regular early morning walk.

Straight over the road at the end of our bohreen, go a hundred yards past high hedges of bramble, ivy on birch and holly and a clearing emerges, offering miles of magnificent rural cocktail.

Away in the distance open bogland stretches to views of Connemara mountains, a landscape crammed with the perfect combination of wildlife to make a collie-lab’s nose twitch like a flamenco castanet.

Reclaimed from this ancient terrain are fields of pasture, painstakingly cleared of stone by dedicated farmers. Water flows in small rivers and stagnates in drainage ditches, where dumped plastic bottle trash disturbs my soul, but to focus on that would be to miss the point.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.