And lose my heart on the burning sand

Someone has lent me this dog to look after.

I've been considering getting a dog, to stop me from going stark staring mad, working on my own like this.

That seems to me to be the main purpose of having a dog, to introduce another consciousness into your immediate vicinity, to distract you from black thoughts about the many thousands of hours you will spend alone with your own black thoughts about the thousands of hours of you will spend alone.

Dogs are self-willed, and answering to their will is a form of self-forgetting. They are also, crucially, inarticulate, because if they could speak they would certainly be so boring that it would cancel out any existential isolation mitigation value. They'd just go on and on about their dietary requirements and guilt-trip you about what it's like having your balls surgically removed in childhood at the behest of the only person you ever really trusted.

Since they can't speak, you can just imagine them agreeing with everything you're thinking, but in an incredibly silent and intuitive way.

Why none of this has ever featured in pet-food advertising is beyond me.

At one agency I worked at, they had a special creative director for the pet food account. One brand of high-end cat food (the really creepy stuff that's made to look like human food, with whole peeled prawns in jelly and eggs) required that the copy be written as though spoken by the cat pictured – the spokescat having a tone-of-voice rather like a gourmand Stephen Fry. There was something really heroic about this creative director, I always thought, and his totally unironic approach to his job. You could actually engage him in an earnest conversation about whether the cat would say this or that. Although it was cruel to do so.

As you can see this dog is a Miniature Pinscher, which is Doberman Pinscher but miniaturised, and obviously immediately has you thinking about dressing dwarves or children up as Waffen SS officers doesn't it?

I've also discovered that if you have a tiny dog like this rudeboys will openly mock you on the streets of W12, saying things like "Rer, that dog is so big ykna." Irony is the main mode of comedy for rudeboys, vide playing shit bashment out-loud on your mobile and then looking round the top deck of the bus going "What? What?"