andrewducker | Dog on the train

Warning, contains unfortunate grossness. And a spoiler for Kill Bill 2, but not an important one.

I spent some time thinking about how best to tell this one, not wanting to give away too much too early, signpost things too clearly or leave the story flat.
And then I remembered the section in Kill Bill 2 where Beatrice and Bill stand outside the chapel, talking. Where you know that soon something tremendously bad is going to happen, and despite the quietness of the scene are full of trepidation of the horror that is to come. Which reminded me that sometimes knowing what’s up ahead can be worse than it being a surprise. With that in mind, here’s foreshadowing of the bluntest nature, immediately preceded by a question that concerned me for several days:

What is the worst thing that can happen travelling on a train with a dog?

Yesterday morning, while walking the dog, I was extremely disturbed to discover that she had diarrhoea.

The question had been worrying me for several days – I’d never travelled with the dog before. In fact she’d never travelled by train before, until my mother took her on a short train trip to see if she’d cope, just one stop up and back again. She’d survived that just fine – no problem with the people or with the motion. I’ve never looked after a dog for more than a day or so, not that it’s a terribly difficult thing to do, but having lived sans dog for 10 years I wasn’t sure if I’d have forgotten how to deal with them.

But I looked after her for the weekend – walked her, fed her, played with her and generally did all the things I’d have to do when I got her home. And it all went well – barring sudden explosions, catastrophic heart failure, etc, I was sure that I could cope with her for a week or so (she’s being shared between me and my brother Hugh for the 3 weeks), especially with the help of flatmate extraordinaire Ed.

The only thing I was really worrying about was the train trip – Tara’s pretty shy, she doesn’t like eye contact and tends to get upset if people. And I had no idea if she was going to get travel sick – the last thing I wanted was a dog throwing up on a train. But she was fine with car travel and I was confident that I could keep her under control. I decided that the best bet was to take her on an hour long walk first thing in the morning so that she’s be tired out and sleep most of the trip.

It was during this walk that I made the disturbing discovery described above.

Fortunately my mother was there to reassure me that she had some anti-stomach-problem pills that would bind the dog up without a problem. So I stopped worrying about it and worried more about the logistics of getting a wary, nervous dog through the crowd at King’s Cross train station and onto the train and then keeping her calm when separated from the people she’s used to – after all, she’s seen me for a few days at a time, 6 or 7 times so while she likes me it’s debatable how much I can reassure her.

Fortunately she was well behaved on the concourse – obviously not happy to be surrounded by strangers, but sitting quietly without any complaint. Getting her on the train was similarly easy – she panicked momentarily when mum left, but calmed down a few moments later and after a few minutes of trying to look in all directions at once she lay down under the seat and slept, only really causing a fuss whenever someone tried to talk to her or touch her (she reacts badly to people staring at her, very common in most animals).

It was about an hour before Edinburgh that the problem started. She woke feeling anxious and refused to be pacified. I took her out into the large area between carriages and she kept jumping up at the windows to look out. I assumed that she was fed up with being on the train – she has boundless energy and usually likes to be played with for at least a couple of hours a day, and attempted to calm her down. She wasn’t having any of it though. I took her out of the way when we stopped at Berwick Upon Tweed, putting her under my seat so she wouldn’t worry people getting on. I debated getting off the train and taking her for a short walk to calm her down, but my ticket was only valid on that particular train and it would have delayed me by an hour or so, so I decided that I’d just have to keep her under control until I got to Edinburgh and then she could play as much as she liked.

It was about five minutes after this the she really got upset. She scrambled onto my lap and then scrabbled at the window. She yelped, refused to quieten down and was panting extremely heavily. I took her into the area between the carriages again, hoping that the space would calm her down. This was just in time, as her instant reaction on having some space was to squat and release what looked like a rather dodgy chicken korma (if you feel ill at this point, join the club, I feel distinctly queasy just typing this).

Realising that she’d been trying to tell me about this for half an hour and no more wanted to be doing this than I did, I comforted her. She was shaking and a bit wild-eyed, but much calmer than she had been. Fortunately she’d also calmed down a lot, standing still and letting me work around her.

I’ve occasionally thought to myself – how can people manage to do the things they do – how do mothers stand to clean up after vomiting babies, nappies, etc. How do nurses deal with incontinent patients, cleaners with blocked up toilets, friends with their drunken vomiting friends? The answer is simple – you do it because you have to. You do it because you have no choice. And once you start doing it, you realise it’s not as bad as you might think. We have this intense barrier of revulsion about dealing with certain materials, but once you get past that, you’re basically just dealing with something remarkably similar to an unpleasant-smelling soup.

So I grabbed some tissues from the toilet and from the bag I’d carefully packed in case of emergencies and mopped up for about 5 minutes. Someone else kindly passed me some more tissues as they came out of the toilet and I dealt with things as best I could. 99% of it came off without a problem, straight into a plastic bag, tied the top and pushed it into a bin. This left a couple of brown streaks across the floor that refused to come off and would require a carpet cleaner, but thankfully didn’t seem to smell. I had wiped my hands as I finished and was waiting for the toilet to be vacated so I could wash them when the announcement came that we were about to pull into the Edinburgh. So I swiftly grabbed my bags and dog and stepped back into the between-carriages area to wait the last minute or so.

I was staring out of the window, waiting for us to travel the last few hundred feet, when I heard a voice behind me say “Actually, I prefer dogs to people.” I turned round to see two golfers, also waiting to get off. The one who hadn’t spoken turned to his friend and said “You mean you’d rather be going on holiday with that dog than me?”, at which point the original speaker asked me if I’d be willing to exchange my dog for his friend, carrying on to wave aside my explanations by saying that my parents would never notice the difference when I handed the ‘dog’ back.

We chatted for a few minutes as the train coasted into the station, the non-dog-lover amazed at how much effort owning a pet required – how you couldn’t leave them for more than eight hours, having to walk them every day and play with them, etc. And then one of them said “And taking them long distance – what do you do if you’re on a train for 5 hours and it needs to go to the toilet?”, to which I replied “Then, you have a problem.”, carefully ignoring the two long (faded) brown streaks on the floor behind him.

Thirty seconds later the doors opened and I fled the train, towed by a dog that wanted to be anywhere there weren’t people. Fortunately Erin had agreed to meet me at the station and help me bring her home – having met Tara a few times before I knew that they got on. She took the dog and I carried my various bags, meaning that I wasn’t being swamped. We paused briefly in Holyrood park so that I could give Tara some water and she perked up quite quickly.

And so I made it home intact, disrobing almost instantly so that I could shower and then laying out the dog’s bed in the living room so she had somewhere familliar to lie. It took an hour or so for her to settle and even when I went to bed she was nervous, preferring to sleep on the safety of her bed rather than join me in the bedroom. Ed also got a bit of a shock as (a) Tara was twice as large as she was and (b) Tara is quite loud when she’s nervous.

Tonight Ed and I are going to take her for a walk on Arthur’s Seat and she’ll get used to Ed being about, and then she should relax enough to make the next few days good fun (except that getting up at 7am is almost never good fun, even to walk dogs).