Below Kate Spicer and Wolfy share a look of
love. Opposite Posing for a shoot — he could
even make a bed out of a Mikael D dressI’ve had love affairs with men that have
driven me mad, then ended with a shrug or a
bit of dramatic wailing before moving on. I’ve
been with my current boyfriend a decade or
so. We have our ups and downs. We’re a part-
nership, practical and autonomous; there is
real love but we are British, prickly, remote.
Well, that’s love, I thought. And I’m not
very good at it.
Until, that is, Wolfy arrived in my life on
January 24, 2015. I first laid eyes on him rolling
across the car park of a service station on the
M25. I crouched down and told him gently,
“You’re coming to live with us.” He steadily
fixed me back with his shining black eyes.
So began a golden age. I spent seven years,
seven weeks, one day and seven hours with
this excellent hound until he died just before
7.30pm on March 16, when his heart stopped
beating under the palm of my hand.
The universe, and a lady called Sarah from a
small Essex animal rescue, delivered Wolfy to
me, and in the car driving home from the
handover this scruffy beast sat between my
legs looking out the window curiously and
without fear. We all knew in our own species-
specific way that fate had delivered us — my
boyfriend, Wolfy and me — a huge bit of luck.
I was 45 when I adopted Wolfy and a little
lost. This third-hand lurcher of indeterminate
age, maybe four or five, was my knight in
shining armour. With Wolfy there were no
dips in affection, my love for him only grew.
He made everything better. It was just like the
fairy tales, except it was a furry tail.
I work at home, alone, so Wolfy and I spent
pretty much every waking and sleeping hour
together. He rarely wore a lead. Where I went
he went. We did things that if you were
making a cheesy romantic movie would work
between human lovers. We would get up at
dawn and walk in Kensington Gardens
watching the sun rise. These were exquisite
mornings that let me rediscover an innocent,
green London. Wolfy would bumble off,
sniffing and exploring, but if I called him he
would come racing back and we would lie on
the grass together, full of love and content.
When I swam in the Serpentine he’d sit on
the pontoon, watching. The other swimmers
knew him and by the time I got out his head
would be sodden from all the friendly wet
hands scruffling his narrow, birdlike skull.
People are nice enough but I don’t want to
be with them all the time. I like my own
company but I like my own company more in
the company of a dog. This silent companion-
ship is medicinal.
In October 2015 I left Wolfy with a
dog sitter to go to a wedding. He bolted,
escaped, was gone for nine days. Following
a social media campaign that went viral
after numerous and surprising celebrities
retweeted my pleas for help (including
Jeremies Corbyn and Clarkson) he was found
and it made the national news: a mechanic
had discovered him feebly howling behind a
steel railway fence and broken him free. That
week and a bit of hell taught me many things.
That British people will rally to a dog-related
cause, that London is a huge place and that I
loved Wolfy to distraction.
My friend Kim and I were looking for him
that week on a bleak estate by the Arsenal. As
we headed home in the early hours I said to
her, “I’m sorry, it all seems mad this searching
and calling.” She said, “Babe, I understand,
you’re having a love affair with Wolfy.” It
sounded odd at the time, creepy and cringey,
but when I wrote a book about him I subtitled
it, truthfully, A Love Story.
So what was happening? My time with him
felt magic to me, and still does. But can it be
deconstructed into a middle-aged woman
plugging gaps in her life with a dumb animal?
Certainly I see these bitchy, misogynistic
theories shuffled around. People commented
on my attachment to him. “What is he, a
support animal?” my American godmother
asked sarcastically when she saw an image of
Wolfy aboard a tiny rural route branch train in
north Wales. I bristled. The truth hurts.
Was my affection needy? Was it about a
lack of something? I don’t have children and
some people had their theories about him
being a baby substitute that was absorbing
that reservoir of unconditional love. But this
nasty, barren-spinster theory of dog love
doesn’t explain all my female friends who are
mothers and also crazy about their dogs.
Plus, I don’t subscribe to this. Perhaps, a bit,
in that the arrival of our hound introduced
some routine and selflessness. There never
seemed to be a good enough reason to come
home until there was the sound of his claws
skittering to meet me when I opened thedoor. It was a relief to have someone else to
think about other than myself. While inter-
viewing a psychotherapist specialising in
addiction recently, he commented on two
traumatised, messed-up clients who were
accidentally fixed by the arrival of dogs.
Someone pinched one of the desperate
Instagram posts I made in the mad sadness I
felt after Wolfy died and recaptioned it, “What
is it about middle-aged women and dogs?”
That person is famously not “doggy”. It’s
an epidemiological fact that there are doggy
people and not-doggy people. Studies of the
world’s largest twin registry, in Sweden, found
a person’s genetic make-up has a “significant”
influence over whether they own a dog, and
that was especially true in women. No snipey
comments about single women with empty
wombs in the Journal of Ethnobiology. Nor
in another study that found domestication
of the species was “disproportionately influ-
enced by dogs’ relationships with women”. It
is women in primitive hunter-gatherer socie-
ties that give dogs names, that pet them, that
observe “personalities”. Dogs are woman’s
best friend. Women brought dogs into the
family fold.
And Wolfy was family. I knew he was dying
of congestive heart failure and that veterinary
medicine could only do so much. A few weeks
before he died we lay by the fire and looked at
and talked to each other without words for
hours. Every fibre of my being loved him.
When he died the longing and missing was
visceral. My ribcage felt stamped on, my
stomach wrung, my throat strangled, there
was ringing in my ears. The howls came from
a primal part of me. Since then, as each day
passes, the sensation of loss is constant but
the tears are fewer. Sometimes the suffo-
cating absence of him, the permanence of a
Wolfy-less life overwhelms me and the
universe feels cold and hard. Other times
there’s soulful gratitude that I shared a joyful
chunk of my life with this fantastic beast. Our
second dog, an adopted and wild podenco
called Bouf, has comforted me and taken on
his job of parenting the 52-year-old woman.
Three days after Wolfy died I looked down
at the water bowl he drank from in the last
hour of his life and wondered what to do.
Should I let it evaporate or bravely throw it
out and move on? It was a real dilemma and
tears dropped into the bowl as I considered
the diminishing evidence of his existence.
I went to collect his collar and the rug used
to carry him out of our home. I stood in the
street inhaling the remnants of his wheaty,
biscuity smell. Each day the aroma fades but
nothing of his memory. I had no idea when I
collected him in 2015 that our love would be
so strong. I am grieving, there is no doubt
about it. I took the contents of the bowl and
put them into a bottle, a homeopathic remedy
to keep in the fridge. Sometimes I drink a little
in remembrance of him, my dog. ■People commented on
my attachment to him.
‘What is he, a support
animal?’ I bristled.
The truth hurts
The Sunday Times Style • 21