Mastiff Man (or The Brigadier)

Bill is doing rather better on the meeting-the-neighbours front than I am. Dogs are a great resource, of course. People will stop to nod and smile at a dog, where they will scarcely spare a second glance, for a human. Bill seems to have collected quite a little coterie around him out there on the common with the other dog-owners, at any rate. Most of his new friends tend to have names like “Poodle Woman”, or "Labrador Man”, it’s true (nothing sexist there, Bill says: it’s just the way things are); and to have prompted little more comment from him than the fact that there they are each day, and that they generally exchange a word or two with him whilst throwing their sticks, or exhorting their dogs to come to heel. One man only has excited anything like vehemence on Bill’s part, and that’s the one he calls Mastiff Man. “An old codger in plus fours and carrying a shooting stick”, is Bill’s description of him. “With a great grumbling brute of a muzzled mastiff on an extended lead.” He’s a retired army officer, apparently. An old brigadier, resident in these parts for many years. Loud, bluff, opinionated - a species of male dowager if ever Bill saw one. And wanting nothing so much as to discuss the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Bill.

“ Fellow wants to talk strategy, for God’ sake!” was Bill’s expostulation on returning from his walk this morning. “Seems to think that everything would be all right out there, if only the people on the ground would listen to him, and take his advice.”

This is in fact red rag territory, for Bill. He’d hoped to pass unrecognised here, but people do have a tendency to think they know him, from having seen him standing tall against turbulent backgrounds on the television so often, shouting his reports from war zones. His usual response to being accosted on the street is to say that he has no opinions in the matter. Or none, at least, that he’s prepared to go to the stake for. Opinions are the first thing to go, he always says, in his line of work. He has learnt, the rough way, that an opinion expressed today has a way of rearing up to shoot one in the foot, tomorrow; and that to put one’s head above the parapet in any cause is most of all to risk getting it blown off…. It doesn’t seem to have gone down very well with the brigadier, however. “Positively sloped off… “ Bill observed, of Mastiff Man's departure from the scene this morning. “Just the sort to take aim and shoot the messenger, if there’s no-one else within range….”.

I confess I can’t think of any way of helping Bill out of this one. Save perhaps suggesting that he take a different route when going out with Monty in the mornings? With people of the brigadier’s sort, avoidance is usually the only possible course. I’m thinking of getting a dog myself, however – it seems to be the most effective way of getting to know people, round here.