I’m home for the week when Michael the Dog Whisperer arrives to look at Dougie. They eye each other across the very same carpet that he – Dougie, not Michael – shat on just hours before. My sister Caoimhe got Michael’s number from whichever friend it is that gives out numbers for Dog Whisperers – a term he doesn’t use himself. Partly because the titular TV personality is considered something of a crank, and partly because there isn’t much whispering involved. We are, after all, in Derry, where speech has the volume and speed of machine gun fire at the best of times.
And this is not the best of times. “I’d give him back if I could find the receipt,” Caoimhe wrote recently, under a carousel of images she’d sent us. Shards of ripped paper, shredded clothing, smashed plant pots and at least three grotesquely disfigured shoes.
