What should I call my dog?

Plus an exciting book announcement, a bit of telly and how to look like a proper pillock at the airport

So, in three-and-a-half weeks, I'm heading back up towards Birmingham to collect my new puppy. A couple of Fridays ago, I spent 12 hours in the car seeing two litters, and decided on a small, chubby, hairy Parson terrier. My mum has had Parsons - firstly, the beloved Trumpet. Secondly, the slightly naughtier but equally beloved Beano. Think of a Jack Russell, but give it longer legs and make it furrier. That’s sort of a rough coated Parson. Look, here’s Beano with his pig:

They’re wonderful and I can already sense myself becoming really quite unhinged about him. Someone sweet on Instagram DM’ed me a warning about what happened to her hormones when she got a puppy as a single 38-year-old woman and, long story short, she became incensed when her family and friends didn’t shower the puppy with the same love and devotion they showered on, eg, a new baby.

I reckon it might be too late though because while I don’t wish to be twee about love at first sight, as soon as I saw this puppy, asleep in the middle of a litter of six, I thought, ‘Oh, you’re mine. Of course you are.’ But what to call him? I’m often amazed by slash in awe of the things people stand in the park and shout. ‘Falstaff! Falstaff!’ yells a middle-class chap on Clapham Common, without any discernible embarrassment at all.

When my mum, sister and I drove north to collect Beano before he was christened Beano, we debated various Dickens names because Mum’s a big Dickens fan and obviously he (Dickens) was fairly good at coming up with them. But I still don’t think I can stand in Crystal Palace park bellowing ‘Pecksniff’ or ‘Fagin’.

Should he have a human name? Some people have very strong opinions about this. My friend Jenn has had great names for her mini dachshunds, firstly Alan, then Geoffrey. Because long-haired dachshunds look a bit like they should be called Alan and Geoffrey, don’t they? I quite like Bertie (after Wooster) but there seem to be quite a few Berties about.

Should you go comedy? India Knight, whose excellent book on dogs I’ve already talked about here, takes a dim view of this and I tend to agree. ‘Beware of going too far down the nostalgia route,' she writes. ‘I’d get the joke if I was called Dave but I wouldn’t really love being called Egbert or Nigel. I would feel belittled.’

I’ve also realised already that if you suggest a name before deciding on it, some people pull a face. It’s presumably the equivalent of being pregnant and saying that you’re thinking of calling the babe Roger. ‘Oh Christ no,’ says whoever you’re talking to. ‘I knew an AWFUL Roger’.

Last week I suggested a name to some old Tatler friends who came for dinner and one of them scowled. ‘You can’t call him that,’ she said, ‘you need to call it after a Lord or something.’ Clare is a classicist who declared that if she ever got a dog it would be called Agrippa or Apollo. But again, I’m not sure I can stand in a park in South East London, shouting after a terrier who’s been saddled with the name of an obscure 18th-century aristocrat. I have thought of calling him Roman after the Succession character, because my puppy was fourth out in his litter and Roman is Logan Roy’s fourth child, plus he has that lovable scamp thing going on. But I also think that’s a bit faddy.

A very lovely woman called Gail Garbutt has sent me a copy of her book, ‘Spot On: Good Names For Dogs’, and I’ve spent a happy hour leafing through it. She’s broken down suggestions into categories including foods (eg Biscuit or Nutmeg), sports (Batsman or Wicket), and military titles. I quite like the idea of a stout Westie called Soldier or Major. She’s magnificently posh, Gail, so she’s also suggested a list of names after Scottish rivers - Isla or Brora. Although also Garry, which I didn’t know was a Scottish river and is fractionally less posh. Interspersed between her lists of names are sweet facts and poems about dogs, and copies are sold in the Sandringham gift shop (or online), so it’s in some extremely grand downstairs loos. A great present if you know someone in the same predicament as me.

I promise this won’t become an entirely dog-themed newsletter, but shout below if you can think of anything suitable for this little guy. We’ve got 24 days and counting (GOD I’m already so pathetic).

Pictures of the week

Ta daaaaaaa! Quick blast of self promotion but this is my newsletter after all. Ahead of my sixth novel coming out IN LESS THAN TWO MONTHS, my lovely publishers have decided to give the covers of all my books a bit of a zhuzh. So here’s the entire backlist, refreshed and updated. I’m particularly thrilled that we’ve kept Wilma the Irish wolfhound on the cover of Did You Miss Me?

Quick(ish) recap:

The Plus One. My first book, starring Polly Spencer, a journalist who works for a posh magazine (where did I get that idea?), and is one day sent up to Yorkshire to interview the playboy son of a duke. Someone quite exciting has the film script for this atm. I am keeping things VERY FIRMLY CROSSED.

What Happens Now? The one that covers the concept of spurgling/sperm burgling/baby trapping. My heroine, Lil, is a 31-year-old who goes on a first date with an extremely handsome man she’s met on an app. They end up sleeping together at his swanky Hampstead flat, she wakes up in the morning to discover he’s left and assumes he’s ghosted her. She goes back to her place in Chiswick and gives her flatmate a debrief, only to suddenly fall silent when the man she’s literally just slept with is on breakfast telly. Turns out, he’s called Max Rushbrooke (Lil didn’t get his surname on the date and he didn’t talk about himself much), and is a posh boy adventurer who’s about to leave for Pakistan to attempt one of the few unconquered mountains left in the world. Cut to a few weeks later, Lil discovers she’s pregnant, has no way of contacting him and suddenly it’s announced on the news that Max Rushbrooke has gone missing in Pakistan, feared dead. Uh ohhhh…

The Wish List. The one about poor old Florence, my 32-year-old heroine who’s never had a boyfriend, so is packed off to see a ‘love coach’ by her bossy step-mother at the beginning of the novel. Gwendolyn the Harley Street love coach (think a frumpy Dawn French) duly makes Florence write a ‘love list’ of all the things she’s looking for in a partner and, because she doesn’t believe it for a second, Florence comes up with a joke list which includes things like ‘likes cats, no pointy shoes, reads books, no skid marks, and isn’t obsessed with social media.’ A few days later, a charming man comes into the bookshop where Florence works, engages her in conversation, and then asks her out. Huh? Could the love coach have helped after all…? WHADDA YA RECKON?

Did You Miss Me? The one I wrote having been inspired by The Split, the TV series about divorce lawyers I mentioned here the other day. Nell has a VERY dull boyfriend and a pretty stressful London existence as a divorce lawyer, and suddenly has to hurry home to Northumberland when a friend of her parents’ dies. At the funeral, she sees her first love for the first time in 15 years and they get it on in the graveyard. Only joking. You have to read it and find out what happens. Also comes with comedy parents and Wilma, that wolfhound. Something exciting is happening with this adaptation and two very brilliant people too. More soon…

Looking Out For Love. The one with Stella, my spoiled heroine, who is suddenly cut off from her dad’s credit card at the start of the novel and ends up working for a private detective who specialises in affairs. I LOVED the research for this because I got to hang out with two former coppers turned private detectives who live in Essex and keep all sorts of disguises and wigs in their cars to bust cheating partners. There’s a retired police dog called Basil in this one too, because obviously I need a dog which is also a character in all of my books.

The Right Place is my NEW NOVEL out on 18 July but I’ve wittered quite enough about my books for now so I’ll save that for down the line. If you’re going on holiday any time soon then the above might make jolly reading, and if you want to buy all the new covers as collectable items then don’t let me stop you. Will brighten the shelves up no end next to all those Chekhovs and Dostoevskys.

Recommendation of the week

Not a single spot of mayo

Sorry to bang on about The Rest Is Entertainment (the podcast) again, BUT there was an interesting episode recently where they talked about Netflix trying to widen its offering. I know, there’s quite a lot on Netflix already. But their point was instead of spending literally hundreds of millions on making original shows like The Crown and 3 Body Problem, the platform is increasingly buying cheaper, already aired stuff from other channels. They cited Cleaning Up, which starred Sheridan Smith as a cleaner in a trading office in the Docklands and originally aired on ITV in 2019. Netflix, explained Marina Hyde, paid something relatively paltry like £30,000 for the six-part series, and yet a couple of weeks ago it was the platform’s third most-watched show. A bargain when you think that the entire series of The Crown supposedly cost upwards of £300m.

Anyyyyyyway, all of this is a rambling preamble (a preramble?) to say that Netflix must have just bought The Fall because it’s suddenly being trailed on there quite heavily. Come on, you know The Fall. It’s the murdery one with Gillian Anderson in 372 silk shirts, never creased or stained even though she works 23 hour-days as a police inspector, trying to stop the devastatingly handsome psychopathic Jamie Dornan from offing more brunettes (that’s not a spoiler, we know he’s a baddie from the beginning). Like millions of us, I watched it originally (it first aired on the BBC ELEVEN years ago), but spied it was back on Netflix over the weekend so have just made Paul watch the first two episodes because he never saw it. Oooooh, it’s good. The shirts. Jamie’s creepiness. The Belfast accents and the way Jamie’s poor little daughter says ‘Daddyyyyyy’. Gillian and her manic swimming in the hotel pool. Gillian being all sexy when she does…literally anything. I’ve completely forgotten what happens so revisiting is an enormous pleasure (although possibly less pleasurable for Paul, because last night I kept saying ‘Oh my god, I remember this bit…’ before clamping my hands over my face).

Nonsense of the week

The dude in the cap is embarrassed for me

You know when you’re at an airport waiting to come home and you’re bored because your flight is delayed by three hours, you’re too fed up to watch anything, too lethargic to read anything, you feel a bit sick because you’ve just eaten an airport Whopper and THEN you see an unbearably smug and deeply pretentious couple who’ve packed their travel backgammon set in their hand luggage and are actually playing it?? In my defence, this was the first time I remembered to take my travel backgammon set away with me, but it made Barcelona airport yesterday a genuine joy. I’ve always thought travel versions of games are a bit fiddly and a faff and when are you going to find time to play what with all that rushing from Boots to passport control to the plane at the gate? Admittedly, I did feel a bit of a berk unfurling my suede travel set on a Starbucks table on the Barcelona’s departures terrace, and I don’t think the man sitting in front of me hugely enjoyed my running commentary on how many doubles I’d got versus how many doubles Paul had got, but it did make the time hurry by for us, if not everyone else. Rolls up into almost nothing, easy to shove in a rucksack. THIS is my one and it’s currently on sale. If you’re travelling on your own, you could always ask someone if they fancy a game. It could be a good pick-up line, actually. Stranger things have happened at airports. One friend of mine met someone by glancing over his shoulder on a plane and offering her a crossword suggestion. They got engaged a few months later.