Puppy Love

Thursday, 9^th April 2020

Desperate times call for desperate measures. In what will be a social experiment with unknown consequences, we are adding two new members to our family. Now, before anyone who knows me starts thinking my better half is going to deposit a pair of twins on the living room rug, fear not.

I was, before the pandemic, entering that phase of life when as a middle-aged parent with older teenagers, you get your old life back. Not only do you not need a babysitter but you can nip out at a moment’s notice or disappear for hours without them even noticing. Really, by this point, as long as the fridge and cupboards are grazeable, then you have rendered yourself redundant.

It was maybe this redundancy that, about a year ago, had us looking into getting a puppy. You know, so there was at least one living being in the house who would do more than shrug and grunt when you arrived home. Of course, we already have a dog, an eleven-year-old Labrador, but the older she gets, the more your comings and goings are met with the doggy equivalent of a shrug, as well. In fact, the younger teenager and the dog both tend to occupy the same space in the living room in an eternal Laze-Off, both smelling of something woolly left out in the rain. Everyone loves Poppy, the Labrador, and so it seems only right to disrupt these last years of her life by introducing a newer, younger, cuter version of herself to chew up her bed and generally get on her tits.

Things accelerate quickly when the older teenager shows us some pictures of a litter of cockapoos that his friend’s dog has. Cue lots of oohing and aahing and then a look passes between me and my better half.

‘Has Noah seen them?’ I ask but then look at the clock. It’s nearly half past one so of course he hasn’t seen the photos of the puppies; his eyes are still shut as he lies in his room waiting for us to introduce waiter service to the little princeling’s domestic schedule.

When he finally slithers downstairs, the deal is sealed – we’re getting a puppy. There’s only one girl – a little black ratty thing at the moment, one week old – so we make a quick call and find that someone else has first dibs but if they pull out, she’s ours. Also, the owner of the puppies has a friend with a three-and-a-half-week-old cream cockapoo girl if we want her, instead. So, either way, we’re going to mess with our older dog’s head in the very near future.

Suddenly, with this news, the Sofa-Sloth (teenager 2) is vertical and running around in delirious joy: ‘We’re getting a puppy!’ He even agrees to the bike ride that he promised to go on yesterday just to make me shut up and leave him alone.

That’s one happy teenager. The other one is just as much of dog-lover but he is pining for something else: his lost love. The three miles between him and his girlfriend may as well be three hundred miles. She exists in our house already, a bit like the hologram of Princess Leia projected by R2D2; we can often see and hear her on Sol’s phone as he moves round the house and garden Face-Timing her. Her voice is one of sadness and lost hope. This enforced physical distance is fine if your marriage is as old as mine but young love, in springtime, at 17 years old…?

After regular updates on how she is struggling without the love of her life, and with my better half not likely to now be called onto hospital wards, I exchange another look with my wife. We go to find the star-crossed lover himself.

‘Has she spoken to her parents about staying here?’

‘Yeah, they’re fine with it?’ he says, his eyes so full of hope that a small village of pygmies could drown in them.

‘Well, then, it looks like we’re getting an Emily,’ I say.

Latest data for the UK (as of 10pm):

Infected: 65,077

Deaths: 7,978

Celebrity Deaths: 2

People I know who are infected: 1 (one teaching assistant)

Song of the Day: ‘Lean On Me’ – Bill Withers (RIP)