Critic Bites Dog-owner
I work hard at overcoming my main prejudices — against marrows, anything with Oliver Ford Davies in it, Stephen Sondheim musicals, grotty pub theatres, the Trafalgar Studios, Blanche Marvin — but I draw the line at dog-owners. Not dogs. Their attached humans.
I was running yesterday — well. jogging — on Hampstead Heath when a grisly grey mutt started jumping round my kneecaps as if I was a hot and steaming piece of succulent red meat. I shouted in a friendly fashion towards the owner: “If you can’t control your dog, put the (expletive deleted) thing on a lead.”
As usual, the human moron started effing and blinding back in my direction. “You’re all the bloody same, you joggers,” he snarled, “what’s the matter with you?!”
This reminded me of the time when a doberman went for my throat. “He’s only being friendly,” cooed the fatuous owner. These people presume you know what their dogs are like as well as they do. Well, we don’t, and we don’t want to, either, thank you very much. Power to the people, death to dog-owners (the stupid ones, anyway).
I am glad to say that most theatrical dog-owners on the heath are very well behaved. Notable among them are poet Adrian Mitchell, casting director Gillian Diamond, actor Jason Watkins, actresses Patti Love and Bernice Stegers, critic Rhoda Koenig and playwright David Hare.
To be truthful, though, the biggest threat to my health and safety when jogging is myself.
Almost a year ago I was running in an orderly slow motion fashion past Declan Donnellan’s back entrance (always a wise precaution, I feel) on the lower slopes of Parliament Hill when I slipped on a divot and torpedoed more or less head first into the gravelly path. My hands seemed to go missing, so I broke the fall with my left shoulder. Which I dislocated.
Pain? I didn’t know what pain was until this moment, not even during the second act of Martin Guerre, or the “physical theatre” sequences in A Matter of Life and Death. My shoulder was protruding like a bag of old coat-hangers.
A woman walked past as I staggered to my feet and enquired helpfully if I’d had a heart attack. I don’t think so, I replied. Not yet, anyway. That’s all right then, she said, the hospital’s just over there, pointing in the direction of the Royal Free and resuming her constitutional.
How I got home, I’ll never know. A neighbour ran me in a car to the A&E at the Free and they snapped the shoulder back into place within half an hour. Marvellous.
Emboldened by this and heartened by my recovery, I braved the tennis courts the other day for the first time in years and limbered up by practising my serve before being joined on the court by my hot-shot son.
I felt a twinge, then a pain of unbearable intensity shooting through my right arm from elbow to wrist: I’d torn every ligament in my fore-arm and paid the price for years of ball-hitting indolence.
So it’s back to the dog-dodging and attached owner avoidance. At least when you go to the theatre you don’t take your life in your hands. Mind you, Lord of the Rings was a close shave, and there are some really dangerous flying feats in Richard II at the Courtyard….
