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A Diary for Bella, our Lockdown Lurcher

August 13, 2020 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

April 14th 2020
Dear Bella
I saw a photo of you today and I think my dream of having a dog might finally come true. No pressure, but you looked adorable in the photo sent by Mary at the rescue group. You’re a lurcher, about a year old, quiet and sweet and housetrained, she said. Too good to be true, I worried.

All the rescue groups have been so busy, I had to nudge them a few times. The two big dog charities had to close early in lockdown as they operated out of shelters. So we’ve dealt with local foster groups instead who operate out of the kindness of people’s homes. Loads of people across Ireland are contacting them to adopt a dog, but they groups are really anxious that people adopt for the right reasons – a dog is for life, not just for Covid.

We’ve been thinking for ages about adopting a dog. Well, two out of the four of us have: Mags, our eldest, and myself. And it was only when Robert – one of those dog-sceptical men – met a gorgeous lurcher recently did he start to think he might cave in and say yes to getting a family dog. As long as it was a lurker… he meant lurcher.

April 17th 2020
Dear Bella
The kids loved the latest photos we got of you today and we also heard you did well at the vet and that you could be ready for us to meet next week!

It’s been over a month since we (humans) were told to stay put, to not go anywhere, work and study and play at home. No-one knows how it will all play out, but I think this could go on for months. We won’t be going to see the family in Canada this summer, and the big wedding there has already been postponed til next year. So it seems like brilliant timing to have a dog in the house, to get used to each other, train you, and train ourselves to look after you.

And when the time comes to go back to work, one of us was always working from home anyway. So we didn’t have to think that through.

All the rescue groups we talked to are so kind, and so careful about the dogs they care for. They had to come and check out our house and garden and family routine to make sure we weren’t an irresponsible bunch who wouldn’t manage a dog once life returned to normal. “If ever it does”, we laughed. One of the groups did their check after lockdown started, and we did that all by WhatsApp instead of meeting them, sending them videos of our garden and house to get their approval and get on their waiting list.

April 21st 2020
Dear Bella
I’m going to meet you on Saturday and probably bring you home with me. We’re so excited, it’s like Christmas! We can’t talk about anything else in the house – not that there was much to talk about anyway.

I just realised today we can actually pick up a few basics we’ll need – like a dog bed and leash, collar and food – because pet shops are considered an essential service and have been open all this time. I also checked with our local vet if they’re open. They were delighted to hear we were taking in a rescue dog but they’d only be available for emergencies and they’ll give you a full check-up when things “get back to normal”.

April 24th 2020
Dear Bella
Seeing as I’ll be coming to meet you tomorrow outside Dublin – and beyond our 2km range – I got a letter from Mary that I can show any Gardaí who might stop me along the way. The letter says I’m out and about for an animal welfare issue. It’s also simpler if I go alone. I’m a little nervous about it, it’s actually been quite nice to stay close to home the last few weeks.

April 25th 2020
Dear Bella,
Driving out of Dublin and into the countryside today felt a bit wild, like I was on holiday. I had my “get-out-of-jail” letter from Mary but I saw no checkpoints on the way. The motorway was full of trucks and lorries, all couriers bringing the homebound people of Ireland their supplies of summer shoes and garden furniture, books and PlayStations.

Mary drove up with you from her farm in Laois and our assignation point was an empty car park outside Naas. She had you out walking on the grass verge outside Pet Stop and I found you there. Your brown eyes shone when I looked at you, you stuck your long head into the crook of my arm and yourself into my heart. I took a quick selfie of the two of us and sent it to the breathless family back home. By the time they called me back with loads of questions, I had already signed off the paperwork (we had to sanitise the pen), figured out how to get you securely into the car, and you and I were already heading up the M7. Mary said I could go home and think about you first, but I wasn’t planning on coming back down again. This was it. You had a home to go to now.

Today will be known as your Gotcha Day. That’s what they call it – instead of having a birthday (as no-one knows when you were born) we’ll be celebrating your Gotcha Day every year on this date.

April 28th 2020
Dear Bella
You don’t know how much we love having you to distract us. And has a dog ever had its every single movement (including the digestive ones) talked about, examined, anticipated so much before. Maybe it’s just because of lockdown, and we were just all so ready to have something new to talk about.

You’re still a bit nervous, not sure of where you are, or sure about us. It will take a few weeks, or months, but that’s one thing we do have.

They say that when you pet a dog your body makes endorphins and it really is true – it makes you feel good and happy. God knows, we could all do with a good dose of endorphins right now. Maybe we should rent you out. Actually, no we won’t.

May 1st 2020
Dear Bella
We saw you run for the first time today out in the field and it took our breath away! Your legs might be long and bony but when they work with those big haunches they’re so powerful.

When we’re out for a walk, people often tell us you’re gorgeous, with your big brown eyes and fawn colour – that’s nice to hear but it’s hard to know what to say. I can’t really say thank you, as I didn’t pick you out of a beauty line-up. You were the dog we got, the one that was available and thought best suitable. And we couldn’t really wait much longer, in case the man of the house might start changing his mind on the dog plan.

May 5th 2020
Dear Bella
We don’t know what kind of life you had before you were rescued from that pound in Wexford and we got to take you home. But I do know that you’re frightened of the sweeping brush and the hoover, and the motorbike down the road. And you’re terrified of the two hurling sticks my husband picked up in Aldi with the hope of picking up a new sport with Aoife, which they’re working on once a day in the field beside us.

Getting the kids out for some kind of exercise feels like a full-time job sometimes. Other parents tell me the same. I don’t know if kids are nervous about the virus, or how to behave or just naturally want to stay idle. “It’s good to be bored” I tell them when I get them off their screens. I wish I had some time to be bored.

May 11th 2020
Dear Bella
You were sitting with us on the couch tonight while we watched the next episode of that old British Bake-Off on TV (we’re finally catching up) and we decided that you’re actually a cat-dog. You’re a lot bonier and about three times as big as a cat but you’re a watcher and a lounger. You don’t bark, you love to curl up on the chair by the window or spread your belly over someone’s lap or up in the air while on your back.

We were warned about lurchers loving couches so maybe we should think about getting another one to fit you. But, actually no: it’s taken so long for my new home-office desk to arrive, (once I had finally found one on a second-rate Ikea site) that I don’t think I’m bothered to shop online for a couch now as well.

May 12th 2020
Dear Bella
I’m really happy to have my new desk set up in the smallest bedroom, though Aoife’s not thrilled about her room being taken over. But it means I have a space where I can shut the door and do my work with no-one else in the room. From the start of lockdown I’ve felt blessed to have my job, to have something to focus on everyday and as it’s education-related, to help other people too. So many people are out of work, temporarily off, or facing really uncertain futures. It’s probably going to get worse. It’s awful.

But back to you Bella. Would you mind not trying to push the door open to say hello while I’m at my desk? My work colleagues have heard all about you, but they might think it a bit weird to see you try to get up on my lap. I know you find it confusing there are other voices in the little room where I am but these meetings with voices is the closest thing I have to an office (and the company of adults) right now.

Next time you want attention try another room in the house, see if one of the kids has finished her homework or facetime check-in with friends – see if they’ll take you out for a walk. That was part of the deal.

May 16th 2020
Dear Bella
I know you love people but would you stop trying to say hello to every stranger you meet. It’s really nice but not everyone wants to stop and say hi these days. People are a bit nervous, of other people, of germs, of human contact.

Even our neighbours on our road – we haven’t met as many in lockdown as I would have thought. Not every community, estate, or cul de sac in Ireland has seen the warm, fuzzy street camaraderie that has touched our needy hearts on the evening news. You were a bit puzzled by the people shouting and clapping out their doors every night, but that didn’t last too long around here. That’s just the way it is.

May 18th 2020
Dear Bella
Today must have been the fifth time we brought you to the off-leash dog park and it’s lovely you get your run in with your new friends – Molly and Ben, Harry and Hermione. But it’s actually been really nice for us humans too. We’ve been able to get to know random people, during these days when we can’t go to the pub, or chat to people on buses or have spontaneous chats with office mates about all kinds of things. It’s a bit like bringing the kids to a playground when they were little and you’d strike up a chat with other parents.

We’ve been able to see how other people are dealing with the lockdown and I think a lot of people already had a dog because they’re on the own, and perhaps quite lonely now, so getting out with their dog helps them deal with some of that. One man comes with his dog and sits on a bench to read his book, the dog staying close beside him and both of them keeping their own peaceful distance and getting the fresh air.

May 22nd 2020
Dear Bella
I realised today that when Mags and I take you out for a walk together, she and I have a proper chat. The kind of chat I think we had stopped having in the last year, and the kind that’s so vital between a mum and her daughter. It’s like having a third presence between us which makes it easier for her to open up and talk about all sorts of stuff. Which is so good, as life can be overwhelming at the best of times when you’re 14. And these are not the best of times. She misses her friends, her routine, and (she might not admit it) school. She’s managing great but it’s just not normal, being at home with her family 24 hours a day, chatting only occasionally with friends, and not knowing when things will settle down.

I had heard that a dog in the house is really good for teenagers, especially girls, and I think your soft heart and big brown eyes are only doing her good. She can give you a good hug when she might think no-one else in the house deserves one. Oh, and I hope you don’t mind showing up quite regularly on Instagram.

Her younger sister still says she wants a cat. But we’ll just have to wait for the next pandemic for that.

May 24th 2020
Dear Bella
We brought you to the beach for the first time today and you didn’t know what to make of it. We couldn’t get you to even dip your feet in the water – the kids thought that maybe the sound of the waves was too loud for you. But two of us went all the way in for a swim and it really wasn’t as cold as we thought it would be. We’ll have to start going regularly this summer. Especially if we can’t go to any warmer beaches, like we might have done normally.

There are loads of lovely places we can go to in Ireland, though let’s hope this amazing good weather will stay when “school” is “finished”. We’re really lucky that we have we have sea and hills and woods within 5km of us. It’s a bit annoying that every other family around is also exploring all these places too so we have to pick the right times to bring you out to enjoy them and have a bit of freedom. And find a parking spot.

May 28th 2020
Dear Bella
It looks like you’ve discovered the trampoline. I was working at my desk earlier and heard a strange squeaka-squeaka out in the garden. Then a thump. That was you jumping down off the trampoline, which doesn’t have a ladder. It’s good to see someone is using it – the kids have gotten a bit tired of it at this stage. It was a lifesaver early in the lockdown and their Dad got them on there once a day as a break from schoolwork. Until he pulled a muscle in his leg. And then they lost interest.

Anyway, you keep at it Bella. At this stage maybe you need some space of your own and that’s where you’ve found it.

June 5th 2020
Dear Bella
Home-school is all finished up now so the kids are happy, though I worry about them having too much time indoors. It’s hard to manage when I’m working myself all day in a closed room. Oh, and the lockdown started a new phase today, still no sign of hairdressers, creches and summer camps opening, but at least your cousins down in Shelbourne Road can start their mad greyhound racing again. Behind “closed doors”, however that’s going to work!

June 15th 2020
Dear Bella
I heard my office is going to reopen in August – just for two days a week for anyone who actually wants to come in. I’ll be there in a flash but my husband will keep working fulltime from home.

As for the kids. Well in September they might start going back to school, five days a week. School is a great – it’s this amazing place where they socialize with other kids, do arts and sports, and learn all sorts of things from teachers who stand right there in front of them. It’s a brilliant arrangement for all concerned.

Aoife was looking forward to taking you on the walk to school each morning with her Dad. You’re really like that as you’ll be smothered in attention at the school gate. So let’s hope you’ll get to experience that before too long.

July 21st 2020
Dear Bella
Well done for surviving your first family holiday. When you got in the car, you probably thought you were heading up to the dog park, but you did so well on that four-hour drive up and down to Antrim. How patient you were to sit for hours squashed in between the two girls and their books, blankets and crisps wrappers. Not a peep out of you, just the odd fart.

You even climbed all over the Giant’s Causeway in the rain. The first time I’ve ever been there and me in my 40s. The whole area was wonderfully quiet, empty of the tourist buses that usually fill the roads with visitors from China, the US, all over. The peace was really nice for us but not great for all the local businesses.

August 4th 2020
Dear Bella
The latest news now is that the pubs are not going to open as planned next week – which doesn’t bother us either way – and that they’ll probably open now on September 1st. That was the same date Mags’s school was due to reopen but the principal finally sent us a message today to say that they won’t be ready by then as they have to follow the government’s advice on how to get the school ready for several hundred kids and teachers. Either way, it’s still obvious that the pubs will open before schools. That’s Ireland for you.

None of these really affects you, you’re just happy to lounge around a lot of the day, sniff around the kitchen, snap at bumblebees and wait for your trips to the park. All of which make you the ideal pet for us.

Live in the moment, that’s what you do. You could teach us all a lesson.

Published in the journal Pendemic.ie in August 2020

Irish Creatures on Irish Coins

January 12, 2020 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

It’s true – your children really can open your world a little wider. A treasure, to them, is often something you just never noticed before.

One recent Sunday, at a local Dublin market that has barely changed in decades, my daughter and I wandered into a bric-a-brac stand. Just the place where a 10-year-old might find some pocket-money-sized treasure.

She dug into a box of old coins, becoming more excited the deeper she got, the rustier her fingers. Settling on a handful of coins, the kind owner let her have them for nothing: “I’m actually happy to be rid of those”, he smiled.

Her treasure – an old Irish penny and halfpenny – did not exactly glitter in her hand. But as she looked closely at them, so did I, amazed at their beautiful design and seeing properly for the first time the money my own mother would have handled as a child.

The ha’penny depicts a pig, or, rather, a sow. We looked closely at the little curly tails of the babies underneath their mum, a jumble of clumsy feet tottering together.

And the mother hen on the penny – what a piece of art she is, standing tall as she herds her little darlings entwined around her short legs. The Irish mammy as hen.

Back at home I search online for the story of these coins, so new to me, but so familiar to the entire country from the 1920s to 1971, the year that Ireland went decimal. This system of shillings, farthings and crowns that I never needed to get my head around.

And I’m amazed to learn that the coins were designed by an Englishman, a sculptor named Percy Metcalfe. He was chosen by a government committee set up in 1926 to develop a coinage for the brand new Irish Free State. The currency was to be pegged to Sterling. This made sense, seeing as 90% of our exports would go to Britain for decades to come, but we could at least make our coins look as unique as possible. The head of this coin committee was none other than poet-slash-Senator W.B.Yeats and it was he who pushed for choosing Irish animals; asking “what better symbols could we find for this horse riding, salmon fishing, cattle raising country?“

The committee had three conditions for the coins’ design. They should have a harp on one side, an inscription in Irish, and include no depictions of modern persons.

The lowliest coins, and presumably the ones most commonly used, show the sow of the ha’penny and hen of the penny, with an elegant woodcock on the farthing.

The choice of something as domestic as a hen was deliberate. The committee felt it would appeal to farmers, and particularly to their “wives and daughters”.

As the coins increase in value, so too does their male-ness. There’s the upstanding hare on the threepence (or, thru’penny bit), the magnificent wolfhound of the sixpence and on up to the shilling’s quasi-mythical bull.

The two-shilling (or florin) has a wise-looking salmon, but lording over all these creatures is the royal Irish beast, the horse on the half-crown. Most impressive of all, is the rare 10-shilling, a piece that depicts the death of Cu Chulainn – the ultimate meeting of animal, man and myth; Irish-style.

The new Irish coins appeared in 1928 and were a hit (as much as anything ever is in Ireland).

Maud Gonne was not a fan and declared that “the coins were entirely suitable for the Free State: designed by an Englishman, minted in England, representative of English values, paid for by the Irish people”.

The choice of harp on the obverse was quite revolutionary, being something of a snub to the monarch’s head which was depicted on all other Commonwealth coins. But an even bigger deal for many in Ireland was the lack of any Christian symbol. Some on the committee felt that any religious symbol might annoy the Ulster Unionists or, at the very least, turn the coins into religious medals instead of public tender.

That didn’t stop one anonymous critic (probably a priest, according to the Irish Independent) declaring:

If these pagan symbols once get a hold, then is the thin edge of the wedge of Freemasonry sunk into the very life of our Catholicity, for the sole object of having these pagan symbols instead of religious emblems on our coins is to wipe out all traces of religion from our minds, to forget the ‘land of saints,’ and beget a land of devil-worshippers, where evil may reign supreme

Our own penny and ha’penny treasures now sit, with all their history, in my
daughter’s collection of kopecs and francs, crowns and toonies. I hope that she will manage to keep them safe and share them with her own daughter one day.

Besotted by Bassets

April 30, 2019 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

It’s becoming a saga – this business of our family not yet having a dog. My elder daughter and I spend a lot of time discussing breeds and looking at other people’s dogs. Like this little fella we saw last week in Sicily while out for a passeggiata with friends in Catania.

I would call this dog Dachshund, or a sausage dog. Dachshund meaning Badger Dog in German. I guess there’s a reason for that.

“Che bel Bassotto” my friend called him.

“A Bassotto?” I asked. “Then what do you call a Basset Hound?” He didn’t know but I went home and looked it up. In Italian, Bassets are also called Bassotto or just “Basset Hound”.

Bassotto comes from the French “bas”, meaning low. And Basset Hound comes from the same kind of root – Basset meaning “quite low”.

But these two breeds are not really related to each other (according to another quick Google search); the droopy eared one is English and the cute sausagey one is German.

And – for the record – neither of them is related to a Beagle. Which in Italian is called “un Beagle”.

To confuse me even more, my younger daughter points me to her Italian Donald Duck comic book (which she still reads weekly) and points out the gang of bumbling bad guys – in Italian they’re called La Banda Bassotti. Meaning, the Dachshund gang.

“Ah those guys”, says my husband, “when I was a kid and read those comics they were called the Beagle Boys“.

And sure enough, these guys have a pet/guard dog called “Ottoperotto”. Who is a Dachshund.

Never mind all these cute beagles, bassets and sausage dogs. We might just make do with something simpler, like a labrador.

(You can check out an earlier post I wrote about how Italians love their dogs, whatever the breed)

(Oh, and the word besotted? That’s not connected. It comes from to become a sot (a fool, or drunkard).

Of mice and murder

September 16, 2016 by EmmaP

The mice of Fiesole have a plan.

MONDAY

I’ve been waiting three days for the local hardware shop to open. Three days since we came home from holiday and discovered our house had been done over by a gang of mice (definitely a gang). So as the bell tower in the piazza rings out four times, I’m here waiting with one other customer for the door to open. I want to buy mousetraps*.

Along comes the owner – I don’t know her name yet but she’s the young, busy, bustling, bespectacled type that makes you feel at ease and she has a Florentine accent you could spread butter with. We bustle in after in.

I love this shop, in fact I love all Italian hardware shops. It’s covered from floor to ceiling with stuff, and all of it is useful. There are wonderful things in plain sight which you didn’t know you needed, and others you desperately need and only she can find for you (and at a good price). In fact the shop is called a Utilità (meaning Usefulness, well in this case just Utility) which is one of the several cool names for a hardware shop, another being the even more lovely word, Mesticheria.

In this, or any, Italian hardware shop, you can step in and embrace the visual jumble, browse the mugs and tablecloths, mango slicers and egg timers, Beatles mugs and non-stick pans, fresh-cut keys and shoe polish. Or you can just enjoy asking for something specific and watching the owner – who grew up in this family business – disappear into the back, under the counter, or up a ladder to where you thought only the wicker baskets were hanging.

As it turns out, many people come in just for a chat, it being right on the main street – the narrow part where the German camper vans have to squeeze through with confusion.

“Oh, that’s a real stink of someone’s bad cooking oil!” she says as she gets herself behind the counter. “Is it from the Indian restaurant across the road?” I ask. “Oh no, they use the right oils, there are always lovely smells coming out of there.”

Foolishly, I let the other waiting woman go first, she is of course a local and I become frustrated when I can’t completely follow the train of their conversation. My Italian isn’t always so awake after lunch. She passes over some cash and it disappears into an envelope, something is scribbled on a piece of paper: it must be to do with the town dinner in the piazza on Friday night.

Not quite the Fiesole shop, but they all look like this

The shop door has been left open to let in air (and pungent oil smells). In the doorway a man has partly lodged himself, craning backwards to talk to someone further down the street or, judging by the volume, across the road. Maybe even the Indian restaurant owner. Living here in this country of talkers, I try my best to start up similar types of chats with the shopkeepers I meet everyday – about the earthquake all the way down there in southern Tuscany, the school schedule, their elderly father, or mine. The doorway man disappears after a few minutes without having come in for his full chat or his packet of nails.

I can tell right away I’m not the first person to come in looking for help with mice murder. The hardware lady’s tired expression gives her the appearance of a local miracle-worker – why do they all think I can sort out their household problems for them, why can’t they just get their houses in order? – and sure enough she tells me she’s all out of traps, the old-fashioned kind, the gluey ones and the little tent ones. In fact, she tells me – “Fiesole is full of mice”.

But she won’t have any more traps in till the end of next week. “Oh Dio!” I say, and mention that I’ll be in Florence tomorrow and may have to take my custom there; she surely understands the urgency. She digs around and shows me all she has left – a packet of terrifying poison tablets – but she isn’t really suggesting I buy them. “It’s much better you buy a trap that ensures you can see the dead mouse, not just guess that it went off and died its (horrible) death somewhere else.” I nod my head. Certo.

She keeps talking before I have the chance to tell her that we have, sort of, a cat on the case. We have in fact started brazenly inviting the neighbour’s cat in for a few ganders around the house and it’s becoming quite fond of one particular floormat and some of the Lego. But she’s already noting in her order book which traps she needs to get in and she tells me I should really get the tented one – “put them in this location at this time of day, make sure you touch them with gloves or your smell will put them off.“ Will the mice guess from my smell that I’m not Italian? I wonder to myself.

“Why do you think there are so many mice around these days?” I ask her. “It’s not really turning cold yet.”

“I don’t really know”, she answers. Then she fixes her eyes on me and states, “Si stanno organizzando”. I take this to mean they’re getting themselves organized, plotting something. She says this with seriousness. And of course she must be right.

As I run back to the car empty-handed, I look around me, imagining the mice mini-gangs of Fiesole and its neighbouring hamlets who are busy setting up a network underneath these streets, the ancient groves and crumbling walls, and the decaying old basements and ill-fitted kitchens, plotting a way to finally take over the three hills of Fiesole.

They’re organizing!

WEDNESDAY

I go to another hardware shop down at the bottom of the hill, in the Cure area of Florence. It’s a bigger shop and there are several people milling around the counter but I’m beckoned forward, the husband of the couple will help me. I tell him I need some mouse traps.

“Fine. Do you want them alive or dead?”

“Um, dead.” (Should I want them alive?)

“And are they small or big? Small like this?” – his hands relatively close together. “Or big, like this? Like a cat?” Oh no, I react, they’re not quite so big. “Right, those are the mice you get from the river.” I assure him we live right at the top of the hill, relieved that we decided against living down here.

He disappears into the back of the back, even though the front of the shop looks like it would have everything. He comes back a minute later with some fancy-looking metal traps, with little teeth on the edges. They’re made in Germany. Of course they are. He tells me the wooden ones are no good. I know that already.

As he rings them up, the customer beside me who’s buying serious lengths of waterproof fabric takes notice. “How much are those?” she asks. “1 euro 80 each.” “Fine, I’ll take a couple of those too then, thanks.”

FRIDAY

So far I’ve caught one little mouse and I’m learning that different cheeses make no difference, nor does chocolate or honey as recommended by some. It must be all about the placement.

Now I’m off to Florence to the really serious hardware shop down near the market.

And a weekend of murder.

*Note to readers: I offer no apology for my topocide. Having learned in several previous cities that I cannot live with a mouse in the house, I have found it best to do them off the quickest and surest way there is.

The Life Domestic

June 9, 2016 by EmmaP

There’s a sign tacked on the wall outside our local pizzeria.

“Found. Gray (domestic) rabbit. Call this number”

And added underneath by someone: Already eaten!

Here in Tuscany rabbits are indeed a regular, and tasty, part of the menu. But the writer of this notice knows that a pet is a pet – hence the care given to mention that the bunny hopping around his house is “domestic”.

In Italian the word for “pet” is “un animale domestico” (a domestic animal) or “un animale di compagnia” (companion animal), this latter sounding only slightly less technical, giving some indication of the emotional value and importance of this human-animal bond.

Italy is a very public society and as no pet is a better companion than a dog, you see dogs everywhere here. They accompany their owners into shops, cafes, church services, on the bus and in the laps of car drivers.

These dogs were left to wait outside the famous butcher’s Falorni in Greve in Chianti – maybe their cones were a foil against the amazing smells during the 15 minutes their (German) owners were inside.

Eating out for lunch or dinner there’s often a dog – of any size – under a table or yapping close by.

And one local gelateria even offers ice cream for dogs.

Ice cream? I'd love some too! — “Ice cream? I’d love some too!”

I was at a children’s sports competition recently and along with half the parents of Florence I was crammed into the stands, indeed sitting on the concrete steps of what was probably the emergency exit. One woman left just after her daughter’s performance – she inched along the row, mobile in one manicured hand, the other holding the leash of her dog, the little yapper left to navigate his own way through the pedicured feet around him.

I can’t say much about the place of cats (or rabbits) in the family home, having come across few. A notable exception was seeing one in the supermarket once, a big furry gray thing ensconsed in the arms of its owner as he moved along the aisles.

Dogs are treated much the way children are – you don’t see them cuddled and spoiled all the time, they’re just along for the ride, even if that includes having their photo taken against the Ponte Vecchio. I haven’t done a spot check of how many Italian dogs have social media accounts (see #puppiesofinstagram) but I suspect overall it would be odder here than in other countries – many of these animals are still more for domestic purpose than simply objects of affection.

There are lots of ideas out there about how different languages interpret the bark of a dog. Scientists believe dogs can understand each other but people have different ways of hearing their bark: but what they seem to have in common is that they speak twice – such as “hav-hav” (Hebrew) or “wan-wan” (Japanese).

My husband and I have been living too peripatetic a life over the last 20 years to justify having a pet of any kind (apparently), but my 10-year-old and I are shameless dog people and share the habit of commenting on every dog we see on the street (or restaurant), especially older dogs who we’d love to adopt. At a recent lunch with friends in the country, my ears perked up when their neighbour mentioned her dog had just had 15 pups. Marking my interest she tried to convince me it would be a good idea to take one home – “well yes”, I told her, “I do have the time to walk it every day, yes we have a garden, yes half the family would love one, but it’s a really nice rented apartment… we couldn’t possibly”. “Oh! but it’s a dog”, she cried. “This is Italy, dogs stay outside!”

And indeed they usually do, at least in the countryside. Over the last couple of decades dogs have started to live more indoors, especially as city apartment-dwellers increasingly like to keep lap dogs like pugs and poodles. But many dogs around our small Tuscan town, are clearly less considered as pets than for traditional jobs like guarding, or weekend-hunting. And they stay outdoors – making sure they let us know they’re there, with a good old barking fit at 4am or 4pm. The ever spot-on Italy observer Tim Parks thinks this Italian need to keep the dog outside might be a hangover from people’s lingering collective memories of living under the same roof as cows and chickens.

The word “domestic” comes from the Latin word “domus” which means house, specifically the house of an upper-class Roman. It entered English as “dome”, or stately building. To me it feels like a formal word, indeed often with negative connotations. It can be associated with the mundane (domestic affairs), with servitude (domestics) and even with aggression and violence (domestic violence or abuse). This last is in fact an ongoing issue in Italy where societal norms deal badly with issues of partner violence, underreporting of abuse is low, and after some horrific high profile murders the media is currently talking of a nationwide emergency of “femicide”.

Un animale domestico – that’s how you say it in many languages. In English the term domestic animal is seen as a more technical term, referring to an animal that is not wild, but serves people and is dependant upon them. It’s even a legal term, have a look at this legal case I found about whether a camel should be considered wild or domestic.

But domestic animal just doesn’t sound as cosy as what we say in English – pet. What a lovely word that is! Just saying it makes you think of an animal that is not only domesticated but truly an emotional companion, for walks in the rain, sitting in the windowsill (tugging at the lace curtain), or just for being there to stroke/pet while you sit together (and watch the cricket on the telly).

The word pet actually came from the Scots Gaelic peata, tame animal, and its softness lends it associations of affection and caring. In Ireland, where it also came straight from the Gaelic, it’s used everyday as a charming appellation for children and friends (“ah sure listen pet, she was just chancing her arm”).

Down the road from our house is a farmhouse down off the road. We can look down over the high garden wall and say an encouraging hello to the unfortunate mutt that lives there. He’s left to himself all day long with a small scrap of garden between the wall and his owner’s house, his dirty mess left all over the ground and with little company. He can’t stop his tail from wagging sadly even as he keeps up the pretence of barking ferociously at you. A weary, empty bark.

In December we visited the cathedral of Lucca and I was taken by how many people were drawn to, (and drawing), this sculpture – the very beautiful funerary monument to the young Ilaria Caretto, carved by Jacopo della Quercia in the stunningly early date of 1406. At her feet sits a dog, not unlike a pug you’d find today in a flat in Kensington or Madrid. It may or may not be her dog, but it’s certainly intended by the artist to represent fidelity and undying love.

What more could you ask for in a pet?