Kate MacDougall - Londons No. 1 Dog-Walking Agency

First published in the UK by Blink Publishing

an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

The Plaza

535 Kings Road, London, SW10 0SZ

Owned by Bonnier Books

Sveavgen 56, Stockholm, Sweden

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Hardback 9781788704298

Ebook 9781788704281

Audio 9781788704427

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or circulated in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue of this book is available from the British Library.

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Copyright Kate MacDougall, 2021

Kate MacDougall has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

This book is a work of non-fiction, based on the life, experiences and recollections of Kate MacDougall. Certain details, including names, have been changed to protect identity and privacy.

Blink Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

www.bonnierbooks.co.uk

To Finlay he will get around to reading it one day ...

And my mum, for being such a good sport.

Contents

Jack Russell, five, Greenwich

October 2006

Number of dogs walked by Londons No.1

Dog-Walking Agency: 1

I t was pigeons that started it all, not dogs. Pigeons were the catalyst to the whole thing. A brace of them, garish and cheap, perched on my desk while they waited for an expert valuation. They were porcelain, mid-nineteenth century and exceptionally ugly. One looked pained, in anguish, as if it might be watching a lover depart for war, while the other was fat and mean with angry beady eyes and looked as if it wanted to settle a score with another pigeon. They wore pink bonnets and carried wicker baskets as though they were just popping out to the shops, an activity that seemed incongruous for a pigeon. Ducks or geese do shops and bonnets, while pigeons are more suited to flat caps and park benches. They were badly miscast, in appearance and execution, an unfortunate waste of time, clay and paint.

The pigeons had been in the owners family for generations, passed down from mother to mother like an unfortunate genetic disease, and carried with them the heavy weight of sentimental value. Their monetary valuation would have been a disappointment to their current custodian, a sprightly retiree from Acton with a Saga brochure under her arm and a winter cruise in her sights. With no offspring to bestow them upon and a penchant for Cash in the Attic, she had decided that they must be worth at least a lower deck cabin to the Canaries and had dropped them off at the front desk of Sothebys to see how they might fare.

There was of course a slim chance that somebody might have parted with their hard-earned cash for them. A camp pigeon fancier perhaps or an eccentric ornithologist. But that was before I smashed both their heads off. The first was whisked clean off the desk by my elbow as I leant over to pick up the phone, the second joining shortly after with a nudge from a lever arch file both siblings not only decapitated but irreparably fractured on the purple carpet tiling in a splatter of ceramic dust and shards of beak and claw.

It was, of course, an accident and, certainly to my Sothebys colleagues, nothing out of the ordinary. I was clumsy Kate. Tall, gangly, butterfingered. There had been one or two porcelain mishaps in the past, a few broken bits of furniture here and there and of course the time I spilt an entire chicken Cuppa Soup on a very rare Persian rug. My clumsiness extended to more than just the objects themselves: I had failed to master the telephone bidding system and frequently cut important people off, usually just as they were about to bid on something expensive, and I often forgot to press mute when needing to describe someone on the other end of the line as an arsehole. I was congenitally uncoordinated, committedly scruffy and not at all suited to the old-school poshness of the place, despite having the right kind of background, the right school, the right pronunciation of escritoire and the prerequisite qualification in art history from a prestigious university. The demise of the pigeons was in fact just one more calamity of many in the four ineffectual and stagnant years I had spent at the auction house.

Simply put, I was bored. Stupidly so. As a back office helper in the antiques department, most of my days were spent answering enquiries, filing reports or sitting in pointless meetings. We supported the experts in their cataloguing and selling, but we werent allowed to learn about the objects, to appraise and critique them, despite the fact that these were skills the job description had demanded when I applied. We ensured it all ran smoothly, that all the boxes were ticked and the forms filled in, with absolutely no room to use our ripe and expensively cultivated minds, no space to expand, to enquire, to advance.

Working life seemed to be one enormous con to me, a deception so brilliant that it had reeled in entire generations of wide-eyed graduates bursting with ideas and energy and youthful enthusiasm, only to station them in front of photocopiers or laminators or shredders. It didnt really matter what your job title was or which company you worked for, most jobs seemed to boil down to moving bits of paper from A to B, appeasing unnecessarily awful people over the phone or email and staring incomprehensibly at spreadsheets. Even friends in sophisticated-sounding jobs like television or finance or the ones who did important things with computers would attest to a preponderance of repetitive software-based activities, interspersed with filing and highlighting and stapling things together. Our education, the years and years of hard study, the accumulation of endless facts and skills, the achievements, the goals, the quiet hopes and guarded dreams, all were seemingly pointless and redundant. The world appeared to be put together by nothing more than stationery and data.

Stumbling blindly into the wide, murky pool of administration was an easy mistake to make as a graduate of the early noughties. It started with temping, the arts graduates first stop on the very bumpy road to forging some sort of career. A receptionist. Data entry. PA to a PA. Making tea, photocopying. I filed papers into a cabinet for one whole week and then shredded paper for another week in an office one street away. I hid the holes in my tights. I was chair number four in a bank of ten receptionists, headsets on, nails to be painted ruby red, directing calls to brokers for eight hours a day, and once made 147 cups of Nescaf before 9am at an insurance company that needed an emergency refreshment assistant.

When you couldnt stomach the temping anymore, you waded into even deeper administration, full-time positions, your own desk. You attended meetings, put things in your drawer and, before you knew it, youd Tippexed your name onto a stapler and knew the names of everyone in IT. This was when it became harder to clamber out of the administration pool. Once you were in, nobody ever wanted you to get out again, as they didnt want to do the admin either, so you were stuck, wallowing in the mire, praying that some of your brain would cling on and not be completely eroded by the sheer tedium. Unless of course you wanted to submerge yourself to an even deeper level, to the admin apex: executive assistants, office managers, coordinators. And this is where I ended up. A fully immersed dunking into the role of Furniture Administrator.