Three or four mornings a week I drive out on the M4 to Cranford Park with Bertie. The park is sandwiched between the motorway and the north runway at Heathrow.
Local residents therefore are people prepared to live under, until this year, a busy flight path. They are the folk who work at Heathrow and take their exercise at Cranford. Exercise is not what you might expect. Several people come trundling across the fields on electric scooters. We exchange good mornings but they don’t have dogs and probably we don’t have much to say to each other, though that’s never stopped me.
My break-through came with a woman with two dogs and, as I thought, a submissive husband following her respectfully. Bertie got lost and after about fifteen minutes I found him playing with her dogs in a fenced field. I hadn’t looked there as he could not get in; she had let him in. Anyway, pleased that he was safe, I thanked her and she thanked me for letting Bertie play with her dogs. She then offered to take Bertie for a walk in the woods with her dogs as they were so happy together. It was an unusual offer as I wasn’t invited to accompany them. I could go back and meet them in the car park later, she proposed.
She was well turned out and from the Middle East. Her companion was, I suppose, a driver or bodyguard. I declined her invitation, suspicious that a beagle heist was afoot. She took it on the chin saying that I was not the usual sort of person she met at Cranford. She meant this in a good way I think. Is she Cruella de Vil or am I over imaginative? Poor Bertie, imprisoned under diplomatic immunity before being jetted out to somewhere hot and sandy. Poor me, as Robert would not have been happy.
Subsequent encounters have been more satisfactory. My new best friend, we only know each other by our dogs’ names, is Hero. She goes on walking holidays with Inn Travel and I think we have done the same walk in the Tyrol. She likes Rory Stewart and she doesn’t like talking about Brexit or the virus. I hope I bump into her again.
Yesterday I met Baxter and seven other dogs with a dog walker. It was freezing cold, starting to rain and I was suspicious that I needed a poo more than Bertie. She was, I think, grateful to Bertie for being Master of the Revels with her pack and I hope I see her again. Incidentally, when we got back to the car park she had all her charges on leads in a trice while Bertie was prancing and dancing around out of reach. She held out a treat and got a grip of his collar while I had been ineffectually chasing him round.
I think you have been given the opening paragraph for at least three works of fiction:
~ a children’s story in which Bertie is kidnapped and has the greatest adventure before being found by a posse of your godchildren (or possibly by now their children).
~ a murder story where you meet a grizzly end after you have told Robert that you had let a total stranger take Bertie off whilst you had a snooze. This may be even shorter than a short story. Perhaps better would be Woodhousean version in which the Robert part is played by Aunt Jemima whose dog you have lost.
~ a spy story (credits to my Mrs) where the woman with Oddjob is acting for a unfriendly foreign power and has been told to meet an upmarket gent in Cranford Park with a Bassett. She is to take the dog off and insert a microchip about Bertie’s person. She got the wrong upmarket gent. (That’s more than enough twaddle. Ed.)