Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
while I am prepared to acknowledge this fact, I shall offer you no sympathy because, monsieur, this is your
bucket of shit.'
Thanking her for playing such a small and passing role in my life, I walked to the edge of town and was
confronted by a feature of landscape that was more wall than hill. The road was lined by the sort of
unappealing houses that get built along any busy road and always look as if they are being slowly shaken to
pieces by heavy lorries. Each yard was enclosed with a chain-link fence, behind each of which dozed a dog
named Spike, who would leap to life and come flying down the front path as I approached and fling himself
repeatedly at the gate, barking and baring his teeth and wanting to strip the flesh from my flanks in the worst
way.
I don't know why it is but something about me incites dogs to a frenzy. I would be a rich man if I had a
nickel for every time a dog tried to get at the marrow in my ankle bone while the owner just stood there and
said, 'Well, I don't understand it, he's never done anything like this before. You must have said something to
him.' That always knocks me out. What would I say to the dog? 'Hello, boy, like to open a vein in my leg?'
The only time a dog will not attack me with a view to putting me in a wheelchair is when I'm a guest at
someone's house sitting on a deep sofa with a glass filled to the brim. In this case the dog - it's always a
large dog with a saliva problem - will decide he doesn't want to kill me but to have sex with me. 'Come on,
Bill, get your pants off. I'm
hot
,' he seems to be saying. The owner always says, 'Is he bothering you?' I love
that, too. 'No, Jim, I adore it when a dog gets his teeth around my balls and frantically rubs the side of my
head with his rear leg.'
'I can put him out if he's bothering you,' the owner always adds. 'Hey,' I want to reply, 'don't put him out,
put him
down
.'
It wouldn't bother me in the least (and I realize I am sounding dangerously like Bernard Levin here,
which God forbid) if all the dogs in the world were placed in a sack and taken to some distant island -
Greenland springs attractively to mind - where they could romp around and sniff each other's anuses to
their hearts' content and never bother or terrorize me again. The only kind of dog I would excuse from this
round-up is poodles. Poodles I would shoot.
I don't like most animals, to tell you the truth. Even goldfish daunt me. Their whole existence seems a
kind of reproach. 'What's it all about?' they seem to be saying. 'I swim here, I swim there. What for?' I can't
look at a goldfish for more than ten seconds without feeling like killing myself, or at least reading a French
novel.
To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they
don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down and they are so trusting and stupid that you cannot
help but lose your heart to them. Where I live there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall
at any hour of the day or night and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too
stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell,
possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your
friends for ever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect.
Durbuy lay, at the foot of a startlingly steep road, on the other side of the hill. It looked to be about a half
a mile below me. It was the kind of hill that, once you started down it, you couldn't guarantee to stop. I
walked with an increasing loss of control, my legs moving beneath me as if on stilts. By the last bend I was
really just a passenger on a pair of alien stumps which were frantically scissoring me towards a stone barn
at the foot of the road. I could see myself going through it like a character in a cartoon, leaving a body-
shaped hole, but instead I did a more interesting thing. I stepped heavily into a wobbly drain, spectacularly
spraining my ankle - I'm sure I heard a crack as of splintering wood - did a series of graceless pirouettes
which even as they were occurring put me in mind of the Frankenstein monster on roller skates, spun across
the road, smacked face-first into the barn wall and, after teetering theatrically for a moment, fell backwards.
I lay still in the tall grass, taking a minute to accommodate the idea that down at the bottom of my right
leg there was an unusual measure of agony going on. At intervals I raised my chin to my chest and gazed
down the length of my body to see if my right foot was facing backwards or otherwise composed in a way
that would account for the vividness of the pain, but it looked normal enough. From where I lay I could also
see back up the hill and I spent some time wondering, in a curiously abstract way, how I was going to get
