The Emotional Apocalypse of Shame (via bad dogs, GOAT rosé, and the insults you never forget)

My oversharing week in mysterious acronyms EPL, GABA, HRV, SCR, DRC, ADHD.

GOOD DOGS GO TO HEAVEN. BAD DOGS ROLL IN SHIT.

One rolled in shit - wearily I bent to do the cautious appraising sniff. It was dried fox or badger probably, both are vile and have a musk that clings on to fur no matter how much soap is applied. There was much to be thankful for. Nothing is as bad as human. I breathed out and was just feeling the beginnings of calm when I realised the other had disappeared for too long and the tracker didn’t work and the panic in my voice rose.

The concern was not that she’d leg it for miles. Or go for livestock. Today’s fears were the road, nearish; a country lane, but you don’t need to be going fast to mangle a dog. Second, her recall’s been better lately, and I was surprised it was taking her so long to come back.

What if the long plastic line on her, a ten metre bright yellow lead used for training recall, had got wedged and her trapped? If she was wedged in a dark spot somewhere then I would not be able to find her. With no tracker, uncovering her would require properly trained sniffer dogs, bloodhounds or a beagle. As time went on the catastrophising unfolded. Not just visions of mangled white furry limbs under car wheels, and podenco shaped bloated corpses like those of the deer taken out by cars on the A303, and just big gusts of concern and fear.

The straight up fabric of “dog, lost” was compounded by all kinds of self-shaming thoughts that shot through it like lurex. “You’ve already lost a dog once, you useless tit. You won’t get any sympathy or a book deal for Lost Dog II. Losing dogs isn’t like Die Hard, asshooooool”

You never know though, perhaps writing books about loving dog and feeling shame is my expertise

And those two sincerely concerned walkers who stopped to ask if they could help this grey haired lady in distress, I hope they didn’t clock me as the tit from yesterday’s newspaper. They looked like Sunday Times readers but probably - hopefully - the sort to throw the Style section away. (I hope Nora would have approved of me turning a couple of second hand shirts and a pair of combat trousers into 1200 words)

"Everything is copy" as Nora Ephron said. And Nora is the oracle and sage of female life writers.

The little podenco’s recall is “better”, relatively. If you have a Labrador or another kind of generally good dog you would still classify little pod’s recall as poor. She is also very good at chasing livestock, and then her recall is crap. Her pull on the lead is letting up, a bit, which has required hours and hours, and hours, of joyless, consistent training by me. “Oh, I don’t find them difficult at all,” says our incredible podenco training wizard, Janine. And I feel shame for moaning about them.

“Come! Come!” In an ever heightening state of panic I tramp around the same bit of path so she can hear me when she comes back to where she last saw me. “Come! Come!”

Even inside this melodrama there’s space for the sort of perspective that frequently compounds the effects of my shame. I get out the “Think of the sick children” stick made from the far more grave suffering of others and start whacking. What must you look like, a mature woman in a basket ball shirt and green shorts. You’re dressed like a 19 year old, you’re ridiculous, you idiot, you self-absorbed flappy useless badly dressed grey-haired child-woman. The compound effect of these layers of shame is for the sensible emotions of focus and some fear become mashed up with those of anger, disgust and sadness.

The Emotion Wheel, a bit of a blur when you compound shame

Around about now it’s time for the male chorus to strike up. “You’re completely useless and you always will be useless,” which is what the ex had said to me when we split and is apparently tattooed on my brain now.

The ex and Janine the podenco trainer don’t let them off the lead much. If you don’t take them off the lead, they don’t run off. Though when you’re me, they do. Even on lead, I fuck up. They slip the collar I didn’t tie tight enough or loosen my feeble grip and take off as I slip a disc after one of the things that causes a 28 kilo of fast twitch muscle Epic Podenco Lurch™ (EPL). Squirrel, deer, cat, rat, magpie, raven, pigeon, crow, bee, bluebottle…paper bag fluttering in the breeze.

I started to imagine his response to me losing the big pod. Ahh shit. The chorus is now an operetta of him and his mother bitching and sighing about me in her Cotswold kitchen while drinking wine from Waitrose.

Jeez, I was really leaning in to the catastrophising now.

“Come! Come! COME!”

People tell me I shouldn’t let these dogs off the lead anywhere but an enclosed field. Well, fuck them. What is this, Switzerland? Will I be arrested for that embarrassingly large bird shit on my car next.

“Come! Come!”

She always comes back, it’s just the roads, and the lead could be stuck. She always comes back. She always comes back.

Last time I was at my Dad’s I got a stern bollocking aged 55 - FIFTY fucking FIVE - for not keeping the big pod on the lead because she went up out of their garden on to Salisbury Plain to hunt rabbits at midnight. I could imagine him and my stepmother also in the kitchen drinking wine from Waitrose, bitching, tutting, sighing and “I told you so,”-ing about me and my lost possibly dead big pod dog, “It was just a matter of time.”

Oh, Boofy come back, please don’t be dead or in peril, I love you so much and I don’t want to look bad.

My beautiful big girly, not running away here.

This isn’t about dogs, it’s about shame. This week I have been feeling shame and reflecting on it. So, yes, that’s a paywall down there. I like to paywall my shame.