The next papacy is not going to the dogs

Since I started writing newspaper columns, three popes have died. I have no reason to believe these facts are related.

After each of the first two popes went, I wrote open letters of application for the job. The first time I lost out to the laser-eyed German, the second to the tubby Argentinian. Will it be third time lucky? I’ll never know because this time I’m not applying. I’ve got a dog instead.

It isn’t much of a dog and I haven’t got it for long, but it’s enough to have made me lose interest in running the Vatican.

Since Blue died some years ago I’ve become used to doglessness, to being able to go on holiday without guilt, or accept offers of work that require me to be out all day. So when Helen said she was going to a wedding in Australia and would I look after Little Boo for a week, saying yes felt like slipping my head back into a favourite noose.

All my dogs have been hefty. Blue was thigh high. His predecessor, Baz, was the size of a small horse. Little Boo is the size of a guinea pig.

He is part chihuahua and part something smaller. He arrived with a bag of accoutrements: there’s a tiny coat he’s supposed to wear when it’s chilly; his brush is little bigger than a toothbrush; his treats were made for cats; and his pretty little leash is no more substantial than a length of string.

I am to feed him 50g of dog roll in the morning and 50g in the evening, diced up small so he can manage it. Fifty grams.

But as with all small dogs, Little Boo doesn’t know he is small. Inside his skull is an ancestral self-image of something between a jackal and a wolf, with a disposition to match.

When Little Boo looks in a mirror — a mirror stood at ankle height — he sees White Fang. White Fang’s getting on, however. Little Boo is into his teens and the teens for a dog are the years of reduction.

Time has sucked the colour from his muzzle. It’s rotted some of his teeth which then had to come out, giving him a grin that caves in on one side. It’s dimmed his eyes and it’s all but deafened him.

Little Boo sleeps deep for nine-tenths of the day. Twice today I have stolen out of a room while he’s been sleeping and he has not noticed. But I have only stolen out to make a coffee and return. You cannot betray a dog.

And there is still so much dog in him. When he thinks something good is about to happen, a treat or a walk or a game, he fling himself in circles with the thrill of it. I don’t recall when I last threw myself in circles with the thrill of it.

And he has courage. Yesterday, when we were walking by the bay, a spaniel tried to befriend both him and me, sniffing around Little Boo and then dropping a ball at my feet for me to throw. Little Boo was having none of it. I was his. He drove the spaniel off, emphatically.

And though his eyes and ears have dimmed, his nose remains as sharp as a pen and a nose is everything to a dog.

Later on that walk he stopped and sniffed the air like any foxhound. He stood with one paw raised, attent, assessing, and then he took off.

He went scrabbling up through scrub and I whistled him but I might as well have whistled Jesus. The call of the ancestors rang in his skull.

For fear of losing him, I scrambled after, batting aside the vegetation he passed under. On he went, nose to the soil like a hound on the scent, and then he stopped and sniffed the air once more and and doubled back and there, a little to one side, he pounced.

Hedgehog. Curled in its coat of spines it was about half his size. He charged at it, barked at it, growled at it, worried at it, pricked his tiny nose against it.

In the end I had to pick him up, protesting, and bear him away. He squirmed in my hands, all dog.

That evening we were together on the sofa. The television showed ranks of cardinals all dressed in capes and hats, pretending to be sad.

I looked at Little Boo asleep beside me and couldn’t see much point in being pope.

• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.