Low Life | 8 August 2009

I hoped Joe was following me down the cliff path. It was unusual for him to lag behind. Normally he likes to lead the way. Perhaps he’d stopped off to self-medicate at the bank of tall grasses where he sometimes likes to browse and bite off a few individual stems, making judicious choices like a careful shopper. Perhaps he was feeling particularly seedy today and he needed to stop off. Certainly his rolling, spastic gait was more pronounced, so he must have been feeling his arthritis.

I was about to call him, when he came careering around the bend in the cliff path, grinning at me. The path at this point is a foot wide and bordered by brambles on one side and tall stinging nettles on the seaward side. (A hundred and fifty years ago this was the main coach road along the coast. Today the road runs inland and the council has to employ a man with a powerful strimmer to keep even a foot-wide footpath clear. Very lush, Devon. Subtropical, virtually.) He was coming down the hill not quite sideways but on the skew. And instead of keeping to the path, he was crashing through the tall nettles. Joe is not normally one for barging through undergrowth. Not his style at all. The grin wasn’t quite like him either. Unlike the smiles of other dogs I’ve known, there is nothing obsequious or ingratiating or silly about Joe’s smile. Joe’s is intelligent, self-possessed, even ironic. He’s the first collie I’ve known, and if he is representative of the breed, I think it must be true that collies are brighter than most. But Joe’s grin, as he came blundering through the stingers towards me, was uncharacteristically fatuous.