There once was a little dog who thought he was a bear...
I had a very good friend who was also a dog. We got along very well, I tried to be the owner he thought I was, and he more or less did what he wanted. Clive would leave a room when I entered, he would jump off a sofa if I sat on it. He preferred his own company to that of anyone else’s, and yet he was also the most tender hearted and kind dog I ever knew, he was enormously patient with puppies, canine and human, and remains the only dog I’ve ever met who actually enjoyed having people blow up his nose.
I began making little cartoons of him when he was maybe a few years old. Being such an honest, straightforward, and affable fellow Clive was an open book when it came to what he was thinking. It was easy to imagine a world where he could talk, plot and scheme, anthropomorphisms were not fanciful, he was a dog, but he was also people.
We had many names for Clive; the Darkness, Mr. Fluffy, but I suppose our most affectionate moniker was ‘Woodle Bear’, ‘Woodle’ for short, sometimes ‘Noodles’, or simply ‘Bear’. Why ‘Bear?’ This was because he sort of looked a bit like a bear, in a certain light, as long as you weren’t too discriminating. A small, hairy, bear, for sure, and not one that was very terrifying except in the middle of the night when he would howl in his sleep. He could turn your hair white doing that.
I cannot say, with hand on heart, that Clive was the bravest dog there ever was. Nevertheless, he nurtured his courage and tried his best, and what little wisdom was afforded him manifested as a sense that a battle avoided was a battle won. All the same, Clive lived by a code, this code was not that of Bushido, or any other ‘way’ of the warrior, it was just an appreciation that there was a way things should be done, and if we weren’t going to do them properly then we shouldn’t be doing them at all. This peculiarity of his manifested in many ways, in refusing to go on walks with people he didn’t know, or not going off lead if he only knew them a bit.
I imagined his courage as being a bear, an aspect of himself that would be a companion for all time and who would never let him down.
Thus was conceived Woodle & Bear, a bromance, a buddy movie, a conversation between a dog and a better self, and a love letter to a dear friend.
It is the nature of having dogs that you should outlive them, and so it was for me. Clive lived a long and happy life and he passed away in the summer of 2019, on the way to the beach. I suppose I’ll get another dog someday, just not yet.
Kev, you must take this further it brought me close to tears, not only for Clive but memories Sam and Wilf
This brought me to tears – minutes before I have to go on a zoom meeting! Uh Oh! Please do a book.