Denise Mullen

Denise Mullen is a journalist, writer and entrepreneur.

My Brief Stint as a Flasher

By Denise Mullen

As a lady-of-a-certain-age it’s not often I find myself half-naked in the open countryside. That was, until last week when, unseasonable though the weather was, I found myself somewhat underdressed and channelling my inner Madonna as I whipped my top off and strode across the field.

Let me take us back a step or two.

I was at work in my office (She-Shed, actually) minding my own business. My husband had called to me that he was about to take the dog out and was going to take her for a really good walk as, although cold, we’d had a merciful respite from the rain.

This information was greeted with a grunt of assent from me. I was up to my elbows in deadlines and frowning solidly at the screen of my desktop. It’s a lovely big screen, new, actually, the sort of screen I think men have for watching football and playing computer games. Anyway, for me it’s perfect for having several documents open at once. But I digress.

So around an hour and a half later I hear the bellow that announces they’re back. It’s swiftly followed, at around the same volume (he’s near the back door, divesting himself of his wellies) with a narrative describing the various exciting encounters enroute. Just for completeness and a fully immersive experience of said ‘exciting encounters’ these featured one angry squirrel, a family of partridge, a paddle and some deer tracks.

I was, sort of, listening with half an ear. Someone once described to me what married life was like and I feel they summed it up perfectly.

‘Married life is, pretty much, totally devoted to two people, standing in two different rooms of the same property shouting ‘WHAT?’ Now, just before we trot through the ensuing carnage, let me take you back to the day I managed to convince Johnny – the mongoose – France that we really should get a dog. Bear with… this is relevant, I promise you.

I had mounted a slow but steady campaign of deep sighs, showing pictures of potential rescue dogs looking sad and other pictures of the happily re-homed.

He was impervious. ‘We have enough pets,’ he’d say. ‘We don’t have time for a dog,’ he’d add. Three years I spent whittling away at his resolve. I’m nothing if not determined.

Then, it came to me. I had absolutely arrived at the one message that would nail it for me. I told him – without a shred of guilt – that I was frightened in the house alone when he worked away.

Now this is not strictly a lie. If, for example, one of the cats brings a little furry friend in to join us, I have been known to hop onto a chair to do a bit of shrieking. You can keep an eye on everything from up there I find.

Johnny t-m France was horrified he had been so selfish. How could he have been so unfeeling, and even put me at risk?

I showed him the picture of Harley. She was scrawny, scruffy, had one brown eye and one blue eye and was languishing in Romania. ‘Get her,’ he said. Before you could say ‘vampire’ (she was in Transylvania) I had filled in the papers and was scheduling a home check visit.

What I have to fess up to, is, erm. Well Johnny kind of forgot that, when we got married, he had a house and I had a house. When we got together we moved into my house and he was renting out his.

The house we live in now, the remote farmhouse down a farm track, no streetlights, no pavement, just fields, owls, mice and bats, those sorts of neighbours, is the house I lived in before I met him. The house I lived in for eight years before I met him – and yes, all of them on my own.

Consequently, I love my dog so much I have no words. Suffice to say, I sort of lied and sort of cheated as well as, sort of, manipulated our way, as a couple mind, to adding a new fur baby to the family.

Having set the scene, you’ll understand why, when the dog shot past the office and I could hear Johnny shouting her, I scooted outside. I just caught a furry streak heading off across the arena as I yelled ‘Harley, WAIT’ in an attempt to drown out his bellows of ‘Come On Then’ which are actually the words we use when we’re about to take her for a walk.

She looked over her shoulder then barrelled through the fence and onto the newly seeded and harrowed field – she was heading straight for the road.

‘WAIT’ I shouted again. He’s still chirruping ‘Come on then’. I turn and with a withering look yell at him to shut up and let me give one command that’s aimed at stopping her.

I struggle through the fence. I’m clad in slippers, jeans and a teeshirt. It’s a bit nippy, but at this stage, all I can feel is the blood pounding in my face and the newly tilled grit under foot swishing into my slippers as I break into a rusty trot.

‘WAIT’. She does. ‘SIT’. She does. The boy has stopped yelling, there is no longer any confusion. To be fair, the ears I repeat wait and sit like a mantra as I scuttle toward her. Lord be praised she raises a back foot for a scratch and I’m there and clutching her collar. She’s 100 yards from a road and has the road sense of a gnat. I think I’m going to faint from relief.

I look back. We’ve come quite some way. Although she’s a 31k dog, so no flyweight and pretty tall, the thought of making the journey back bent double and clutching her collar isn’t one I relish.

I can see him, small in the distance. He’s leaning on the top rail of the fence.

There’s nothing for it, so I whip off my teeshirt and thread it through Harley’s collar. At least now I can stand and walk her back. She thinks this is tremendous fun and keeps jumping up at the flapping teeshirt. We trudge through the furrows. Me in bra (nor is it one of my best, fancy bras), mud-spattered jeans and gritty slippers. Her, well she’s living her best life, ‘boiled-ham tongue’ lolling to one side as she relaxes into an easy lope. ‘Two walks!’ she’s thinking ‘Excellent’.

The moral of this story? Well, there isn’t one really. Just that, if circumstances had dictated I also had to shed my jeans and slippers to save my dog from intimate acquaintance with that road – I’d have done it in a heartbeat.