The moose

It all began when the corgi said he was lonely, which was something I found difficult to believe given his innate curmudgeonly nature and habit of nipping people who get too close to him, literally and figuratively (that applies to the nipping as well as the closeness - he is a master of the metaphorical nip, delivered with speed and precision for maximum cutting effect). He muttered - he usually mutters, in that rather depressing South Wales accent he affects, in the hope of sounding like Dylan Thomas, or Richey Edwards, the vanished and unstable Manic Street Preachers' singer who once carved '4 real' on his arm during a TV interview, a truly manic act which led to a piece of copycat self-abuse by the corgi involving the lid of an empty dog food can and a hopelessly triumphant semi-colon (he does have this thing about punctuation) that totally missed the point, or the full stop, as I joked with him afterwards, earning me a rather deep nip in the calf - something about the need for another quadruped in the house.

The corgi had his heart set on a kitten-heeled mule. He felt that this lovely creature would embody everything he found attractive in the larger quadrupeds: elegance, playfulness, fleetness of foot, a strong, even puritanical, work ethic and a long muzzle. Breaking the news to him was not an easy task, despite the fact that I had had the foresight to don a pair of vellum gaiters to protect my calves against the inevitable reaction. A heart that is set too hard may easily break, as they say - well perhaps they don't say that - and my corgi's grey, bleak, despondent demeanour as I told him that this was not a creature that could be found in this universe was such that I felt the need to comfort him by saying he must have mistaken 'mule' for 'moose'.

One thing led to another and in a few weeks a large crate arrived from the Canadian tundra containing a few tons of moss and a moose calf - about the only calf the corgi wouldn't nip. Now he's in his prime, he stands a good seven feet at the shoulder, if that makes any sense, and lives happily off a diet of lichen, tree bark, grass and pizza crusts. He's a bit scarred from where the cars bounce off him - he has an ingrained moose habit of standing, a vacant expression playing over his russet countenance, in the middle of the road on a blind bend. I've asked him to stand on the right-hand side of the road on that bend, but since he can't remember which way he was pointing the last time he stood there, and he always stands on what he sees as the right-hand side, there are still a fair number of collisions.

That vacant expression? It doesn't even begin to hint at just how little goes on inside his head. It's a noble, magnificent head, bony and a rich brown, and you know that it's like that all the way through to the other side. What he does best, really, is stand. I can be in the kitchen, engrossed in one of Claudio's recipes, like 'Poached Bicep of Steward in an Andean salsa' (strange, he was unusually coy about where the recipe and ingredients for that one came from), when I realise that that adorable moose has been standing there next to me, blocking out the light. Just standing. Mainly he does it in a sincere way, but sometimes he does it humorously, which I call his standing joke, but he remains blank when I say that and the corgi nips me in the calf.