One of the seven great dogs.

When I finished reading Straw Dogs I did what any man who has been exposed to the wilful hopelessness of the human animal would do. I took the dog for a walk.

Our dog is Benji. As you can see, he’s a handsome character. We got him from a rescue centre 5 years ago and he’s now 13 going on 14, or mid 70s in dog years. He’s completely deaf, but he’s sprightly and affectionate, a good companion. Having him as part of our family has, I think, brought out the best in all of us. It’s put us more in touch with our immediate surroundings because of having to go out for walks. He’s also helped us to brush up on our pack mentality. If we’re all in a room and he’s not there we feel incomplete, and we’ll bring his bed in so that he can lie there, sleeping and twitching and farting. And we feel good, being together, and having him there.

Our walking territory is the Mersey Valley, riverside woods and meadows reclaimed by nature from their former purpose as a sewage works. The area is now an urban country park, bordered on one side by the streets of Chorlton and on the other by the M60 motorway. We’ve now spent 5 years walking its paths in all seasons and all weathers. Although I now see them on a regular basis, I’m still thrilled at the sight of Jays, Herons, the Canada Geese nursery school that appears on the river every spring, and the kingfishers that we very occasionally spot on the brook that feeds into the river. We’ve seen all manner of small, and not so small, rodents, including a mink that stared defiantly at my wife from the opposite bank of the brook one day. We’ve heard, but never seen, woodpeckers. The electricity pylon in the distance in the picture below is a landing point for the Cormorants that frequent the river and the Water Parks, so we've come  to know it as the electric cliff. 

It’s a whole world of nature that Benji, in his understated way, has gifted to us. And now he’s a bit off colour. He’s old, and in many ways content. He has good days when you could easily think of him as a frisky young dog, just past being a pup. And he has the other days, like yesterday, where he’s reluctant to leave the house to go for a walk, and his breathing can be a bit wheezy, and I hate to think of him not lying there in front of the TV, dreaming and whimpering. Our stinky old friend. Our dog.

The title of this post is a reference to a film that came out in 2008, and which has become a family (pack) favourite. It’s called Dean Spanley. Any attempt at a synopsis wouldn’t really do it justice. It’s about life and death, loss and grief, and it’s funny and sad. One of the main characters confidently states, more than once, that there are only ever 7 great dogs. For us, Benji is the greatest of them.