I drove down the M4 motorway, away from London. I’d first done this drive in reverse 11 years earlier in my little white Mini. I wondered what I’d got to show for all that time in the big city. Of course there was plenty, but at that moment I couldn’t think of anything.
As the darkness came down the dogs huddled close together on the back seat, sitting bolt upright against each other. Normally they’d have gone to sleep, curling around each other for comfort. This time was different. Maybe they felt something coming off me, a sense of utter despair maybe.
The motorway was quiet. Most people were still on holidays, sharing the Christmas cheer with their families. I turned off the motorway and into the Cotswolds and drove down deserted country lanes in complete darkness, only my car lights moving out there. Sometimes I’d pass through a small village and see a pub with its lights glittering and people moving and jostling in there in the warmth, swapping stories and jokes, telling gossip, drinking local ale, having a good time.  
When I pulled up the dogs tensed in the back, sitting upright, pressing against each other. I felt like I was delivering them to Dachau.  
I got them out the back and Ronald met me. You’ll remember, this was the bloke who’d sold me these two dogs five years ago when they were pups. He’d been down in Cornwall then, living by himself. His wife had left him. It’s either me or it’s the dogs, she said, so Ron threw her out. Fortunately for him, he soon met someone else. Because he used to go to all the dog shows and prance around with his pure bred Bernese Mountain dogs he caught the eye of this similarly divorced woman. I’m sure that at these dog shows there are always people looking at the dog handlers bouncing alongside the dogs, rather than actually looking at the dogs themselves. If you think about it, if you’re a dog lover and you’re on the lookout for a like-minded partner it makes sense to get along to as many dog shows as you can handle. This woman who Ron moved in with happened to run a Bernese Dog rescue centre, so all in all Ron was in dog heaven. I knew all this because I’d kept in touch with him over the years and he’d followed Mitchell and Benson’s progress from pups (or pupsters, as he liked to call them) and laughed along with me about their ridiculous antics. The time Mitchell took my wallet out into the garden, pulled the credit cards out with his teeth and then buried them. Perhaps it had been his way of saying, whoa there! No more spending! Either way, in a garden in a house in Reigate there is an American Express Gold card. This will amaze and astonish future archaeologists who will wonder what the hell was the purpose of this piece of bright shiny plastic. I sometimes wondered that myself.
Then there was the time Benson ate a whole bag of apples. Yes, a whole bag, plastic and all, and when they eventually came out the other end the digested glop was still very neatly packaged. Another time Mitch made me swerve off the road by biting my ear and I hurtled into the front of a fruit and veg stall, much to the dismay of the owner. It was weeks before I’d removed all of the grated onions out of the front grille of the Citroen and months before I stopped crying onion tears every time I drove more than five miles. Once I drove down to my parents in Wales and couldn’t stop my eyes crying for three hours. Even when I put my head out the side window it didn’t clear. It must have looked a sight, me and two large dogs, all of us with our heads out separate side windows, driving at speed down the M4.  Ron howled with laughter at that one and when I told him about Benson running away from other dogs, even the chihuahua he met one day in the park, Ron sighed and said, “he is just such a sensitive boy”.
But this time we didn’t say anything. I handed their leads over and they both looked at me at the same time, swivelling their big shaggy heads around and then tilting them like they were asking me a question. Like, what’s going on here then, skipper?
It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.
It might not seem important. People told me they had to go, you couldn’t afford to keep them. Okay, but I lived with these guys for five years and they were often the only ones I had to talk to. Without them I probably wouldn’t be writing this now, so it was an indescribably painful decision to make. It was like I’d killed someone and in a way I had. I’d just gone and thrown away my two best friends.
I got in the car and drove away. A grown man taken down to this. No job, no house, no prospects, dogless, nothing. Rock bottom. The pits. I’ll be damned if I know how I drove, what with all the crying.
And this time it wasn’t the onions.

to be continued...