and politely intervenes.
Dogs aid concentration: if I have something difficult to write I retreat to my shed, and with Kudu at my feet, the words come easily. Dogs have sharp instincts for health and safety: if I work for too long at a stretch I find a large head nuzzling my knees, demanding a screen break.
Above all, dogs can puncture the pomposity that is such a common feature of corporate life. There is a famous passage about this in Pepysâs account of the return of Charles II to England in 1660. The king arrived at Dover in great splendour aboard the
Royal Charles
, and Pepys was in the flotilla of small boats that accompanied him: âI went, and Mr Mansell, and one of the Kingâs footmen,â he recorded, âwith a dog that the king loved (which shit in the boat, which made us laugh, and me think that a king and all that belong to him are but just as others are).â Obviously one would hope to avoid the shitting, but the cheerfully egalitarian manner with which dogs treat humans would remind the grandest CEO that he is âjust as others areâ.
By way of a postscript to the launch of this important campaign, here is a charming story a reader has offered in response to my column on a canine âsixth senseâ. He described looking after an elderly and unwell father who was subject to what he termed âfitsâ towards the end of his life, and he wrote that his West Highland Terrier, Sophie, alwayswarned him in advance that a fitting episode was about to take place. She would approach the bedside and bark in a particular way, enabling my correspondent to offer comfort when it was needed.
Imagine what a dog like that could do in the board room.
My stint as ITNâs diplomatic editor in the early 1990s coincided with a period of especially intense international summitry. The Soviet empire was collapsing, Germany was being reunited, the Balkans were in flames, and the European Union (or the European Community, as it then was) was convulsed by negotiations over what would become the euro. All of these things required seemingly endless meetings of Very Important Persons, and it was my job to cover them. I spent a punishing amount of time getting on planes and living in hotel rooms.
Most of these meetings took place in glamorous surroundings â a palace in Rome, a château in the French countryside or, famously, the picturesque old Dutch town of Maastricht â but the way they were run made it quite impossible to appreciate or enjoy the places. The host government would find some suitably utilitarian space â very often an underground car park â where they could erect a âmedia villageâ of temporary offices and broadcasting facilities, and these artificial worlds became our homes; we could attend press conferences, eat our meals and put together our stories without ever coming up for air. I used to arrive early in themorning and leave late (
News at Ten
was my main duty), and it was perfectly possible to spend a couple of days in Paris, Moscow or Washington without seeing anything at all of those great cities. It became a blur: they were years of going everywhere but visiting nowhere â and any reader who travels for business will recognize the experience.
I have vowed never to travel like that again â in fact, I have become primly moralistic on the subject. If you find yourself somewhere exotic at someone elseâs expense, having stomped down a great big carbon footprint to get there, I think you have a duty to explore the place a bit. No matter how exhausted I am at the end of a news-reporting trip, I always force myself to look around.
And Kudu gave me a new way of getting under the skin (or should that be the coat?) of new places.
The autumn of 2009 was another period of intense travel: I was working on a radio series about the decade of the ânoughtiesâ, and we had ambitiously set ourselves the task of telling the story with a
Dogs aid concentration: if I have something difficult to write I retreat to my shed, and with Kudu at my feet, the words come easily. Dogs have sharp instincts for health and safety: if I work for too long at a stretch I find a large head nuzzling my knees, demanding a screen break.
Above all, dogs can puncture the pomposity that is such a common feature of corporate life. There is a famous passage about this in Pepysâs account of the return of Charles II to England in 1660. The king arrived at Dover in great splendour aboard the
Royal Charles
, and Pepys was in the flotilla of small boats that accompanied him: âI went, and Mr Mansell, and one of the Kingâs footmen,â he recorded, âwith a dog that the king loved (which shit in the boat, which made us laugh, and me think that a king and all that belong to him are but just as others are).â Obviously one would hope to avoid the shitting, but the cheerfully egalitarian manner with which dogs treat humans would remind the grandest CEO that he is âjust as others areâ.
By way of a postscript to the launch of this important campaign, here is a charming story a reader has offered in response to my column on a canine âsixth senseâ. He described looking after an elderly and unwell father who was subject to what he termed âfitsâ towards the end of his life, and he wrote that his West Highland Terrier, Sophie, alwayswarned him in advance that a fitting episode was about to take place. She would approach the bedside and bark in a particular way, enabling my correspondent to offer comfort when it was needed.
Imagine what a dog like that could do in the board room.
My stint as ITNâs diplomatic editor in the early 1990s coincided with a period of especially intense international summitry. The Soviet empire was collapsing, Germany was being reunited, the Balkans were in flames, and the European Union (or the European Community, as it then was) was convulsed by negotiations over what would become the euro. All of these things required seemingly endless meetings of Very Important Persons, and it was my job to cover them. I spent a punishing amount of time getting on planes and living in hotel rooms.
Most of these meetings took place in glamorous surroundings â a palace in Rome, a château in the French countryside or, famously, the picturesque old Dutch town of Maastricht â but the way they were run made it quite impossible to appreciate or enjoy the places. The host government would find some suitably utilitarian space â very often an underground car park â where they could erect a âmedia villageâ of temporary offices and broadcasting facilities, and these artificial worlds became our homes; we could attend press conferences, eat our meals and put together our stories without ever coming up for air. I used to arrive early in themorning and leave late (
News at Ten
was my main duty), and it was perfectly possible to spend a couple of days in Paris, Moscow or Washington without seeing anything at all of those great cities. It became a blur: they were years of going everywhere but visiting nowhere â and any reader who travels for business will recognize the experience.
I have vowed never to travel like that again â in fact, I have become primly moralistic on the subject. If you find yourself somewhere exotic at someone elseâs expense, having stomped down a great big carbon footprint to get there, I think you have a duty to explore the place a bit. No matter how exhausted I am at the end of a news-reporting trip, I always force myself to look around.
And Kudu gave me a new way of getting under the skin (or should that be the coat?) of new places.
The autumn of 2009 was another period of intense travel: I was working on a radio series about the decade of the ânoughtiesâ, and we had ambitiously set ourselves the task of telling the story with a
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