There’s nothing quite like a puppy for luring total strangers into conversation. So discovers journalist Nick Duerden when Missy the border terrier joins the family. As energetic as “a just-lit firework”, her role is to provide him with gentle daily exercise while he recovers from the post-viral fatigue that he’s chronicled elsewhere. She’s also set to give his atrophying social skills a workout, stripping him of midlife invisibility and earning him an entrée to an unexpected new social circle at his local London park.
There he meets the likes of Pavlov, a Russian existentialist who shares his council flat with Dog, a three-legged staffie; Elizabeth, an elegant older widow and owner of grey-muzzled Betty; and Agatha, an art teacher whose grandparents came here from the Caribbean, and who is forever dressed in purple, Coco the French bulldog tucked under her arm. There’s also Lintang, an Indonesian live-in cleaner tasked with walking her employer’s tangle of pomeranians.
