It’s 4 a.m. and my German shorthaired pointer, Percy, is lying on top of me. This isn’t a giant infraction on his part. Percy and I have long shared a bed. We start the early evening as we always do – me reading and he beside me at my invitation, the light on his side of the bed is on too, in case he wants to read as well; something German perhaps, like Thomas Mann. Later, when I decide to go to sleep, I turn out both of our lights and we glide off – his paw often in my hand – into the great unconscious.
At some point during the night, he leaves his designated strip and inches towards me, which is probably why my dreams always seem to orbit around being strangled with a velvet ribbon. I should point out here that neither of my children has ever been allowed to co-sleep next to me, something I consider deeply unnatural and a bad habit. Sharing a bed with Percy, though, is entirely as I would like it.
The market, it seems, has different ideas. Mattress maker Silentnight has released a pod for dogs to share with their owners. Neither dog basket nor beanbag, it is designed for humans to spend quality time with their dogs and is aimed at Gen Zers and their pandemic-bought canines. Since Percy and I already share a basket called my bed, I can’t see how I will have need of such an item. But I’m still curious. In the promotional pictures, the Silentnight is marketed as multi-use: a young woman in her pyjamas lies in the pod, looking at her iPhone or notionally asleep. A dog appears in just one image, captioned as ‘cosy cuddles’, its face faintly stressed and panting.
As in Wallace and Gromit, the dog acts as prophet, warning the human of imminent danger or alarm. Like Wallace, too busy eating Wensleydale cheese, we do not heed him. Reviews of the Silentnight pod on Amazon are mixed. Most applaud the size – big enough for three German shepherds and their owner – some decry the confusion: ‘my dog didn’t know where to sit’. To me, the panting dog says it all: what on earth is wrong with the old arrangement?
Typically, when the question of dogs on beds is raised, it brings back the following response: absolute filth. ‘Your dog can’t wipe its arse,’ says one friend, matter-of-factly, while another points out, darkly, that ‘you don’t know where he’s been’. It’s hard for me to respond to the logic of these points: no, he can’t wipe his arse and no, I don’t know exactly where he’s been because he runs at great speed across farmland. What I can and do point out is that I don’t care. Correction: I do care about hygiene, but I believe my dog to be entirely fastidious and immaculate. Other dogs may have turd hanging out of their backsides or stink of fox shit, but not mine. To me, he is perfect. My dog-on-bed policy operates at a level of self-delusion and denial that I think other people call love.
Denial aside, dogs on beds is – like so much else in this country – about class. Look at Annie Tempest’s Tottering by Gently cartoons in Country Life, featuring Daffy and Dicky at Tottering Hall, whose four-poster bed is so laden down with dogs that they can hardly see each other. Or interior designer Sibyl Colefax’s belief that damask cushions and brocade sofas in a drawing room look better with a light dusting of dog hair. Allowing dogs to trash your furniture and eat your brown furniture is a very Mitford U flex; or as Gen Z might say now, ‘if you know, you know’.
Growing up in an impoverished aristocratic and bohemian household, I was always told that it was extremely petit bourgeois and naff to care about dogs lying on the furniture – on a par with being asked to take your shoes off at the front door, forbidding dogs upstairs or covering things with clingfilm. All very well, of course, until the dining room sideboard collapses from dogs chewing one leg or you step, as Charles Mosley, editor of Debrett’s, famously did, on a dog poo as you get out of bed. No matter; in our famously contrarian class system, slumming it in your pile with your dogs is quite simply the grandest thing of all.
Percy and I won’t be investing in a Silentnight pod to spend ‘quality’ time together. Our time à deux will continue to be spent with him leaving paw prints on the pillows and pellets of dog food in between the cushions on the drawing room sofa. The arrangement works – like all the best things do – by invitation, not by engineered mutual consensus. Now, if you don’t mind, we’re off to bed.
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