Tim Dowling: Is the puppy homesick? An all-consuming worry

I am sitting in a lawn chair, in the day’s last square of sunlight. There is a book on my knees, but I am not reading it. The puppy we’re looking after for friends appears at the garden door with a shoe in its mouth. It runs past me, ears flapping, belly skimming the grass. A few seconds later it runs past me the other way, this time with a sock. The shoe, I noticed, was not my shoe. But the sock is definitely mine. It has been going on for a week, this wholesale displacement of footwear. I am used to it now. But I had forgotten what it is like to worry about something small and alive: whether it is homesick; whether it has run out the front door; whether I am going to step on it; whether or not it has eaten a dishwasher tablet. The worry is all-consuming, and I am out of practice. On its third pass the dog diverts from its route, runs up my shins and dives into my lap. It is absurdly pleased to see me, as if I have been away for years, instead of just here, in this chair, for [...]

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