It’s time to admit it: my dog has a bigger social network than me

I don’t normally do the morning dog walk; it’s my wife’s thing. But we’re going away for the weekend straight afterwards, so on this particular Friday it makes sense for us to go together. The park is more or less on the way out of town.

“Morning!” my wife sings, waving at someone in the car park.

The person waves back, shouting something I can’t hear. My wife laughs.

“I have a lot of friends in this park,” she says. “And also some enemies, but mostly friends.”

It’s clearly true: over the course of half an hour my wife stops to chat with a dozen people: couples, singles, professional dog walkers, park employees.

“You’re not used to this, are you?” she says to me.

“The social whirl?” I say.

“Just talking to people,” she says.

“I don’t come this way,” I say. When I do the afternoon dog walk I tend to stick to a perimeter route that means I almost never meet anyone I know, although I do still run into people who know my dog.

“It’s Jean!” they will shout. The dog will run up to these strangers, tail wagging, and they will exchange some customary greeting, or perhaps share an in-joke. Then the person will look me up and down suspiciously, give my dog a treat, and walk on.

“Bye, Jean!” they call, over their shoulders.

“Who was that?” I will say, once the dog and I are out of earshot. “How do you know them? What kind of car do they have?”

The dog sneezes, shakes her head, and hares off down the path ahead, disappearing round the corner. From the other side of a stand of trees I will hear a distant cry: “Look, it’s Jean!”

It can be humiliating to negotiate a landscape where your dog has a larger social network and better name recognition than you do. But that’s nothing compared with the total effacement brought about by a turn round the park with my wife. She doesn’t introduce me to any of the people she stops to talk to, because that’s not how things work in the park: nobody introduces anybody to anybody. Your reputation is built on a thousand daily encounters, one walk at a time. There’s no fast track based on who you know, or who your dog knows.

The chief topic on this particular Friday is a perennial complaint: the start of festival season in the park, when temporary walls are being erected to enclose paying customers inside the tented spaces of food festivals, drink festivals and music festivals. The walls stay up most of the summer, bisecting fields and blocking off familiar paths, forcing everybody to walk the long way round the outside.

“It’s ridiculous, isn’t it,” my wife says.

“It’s like being in a prison exercise yard,” says the woman she’s talking to.

“Actually this is the way I usually go,” I say. No one looks at me. No one hears.

My wife and I continue along the temporary wall, which stretches into the distance, curving gently leftward.

“Not that many people here today,” she says. “I guess everyone’s away.”

“Do you even tell people you’re married?” I say.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “You don’t do mornings.”

“I do sometimes do the mornings,” I say.

“Almost never,” she says.

“But when I do the mornings I go to a different park, where we have our own friends,” I say.

“Uh-huh,” my wife says.

“It’s true,” I say. “One of our friends, for example, tells me about the latest artefacts he has found while combing the muddy Thames foreshore.”

“What’s his name?” she says.

“I only know his dog’s name,” I say, “and I forget his dog’s name.”

We reach the security checkpoint at the festival entrance, which is still being assembled by a group of young people in hi-vis vests. The dog, ignoring the barriers, runs into the festival grounds.

“She’s got a wristband,” my wife says. Everyone laughs.

We peel away from the wall and join the path along the edge of the playground, then turn right to cut across a cricket pitch. The dog shoots off ahead of us. Someone up by the tennis courts shouts: “It’s Jean!”

“We should get going,” my wife says. “Otherwise traffic will be a nightmare.”

She waves to a far off figure, a mere silhouette in the morning light, holding a ball on a stick.

“Max,” I say. “His dog is called Max.”