18/08/2008
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Brenda, the dog has started to earn her spurs, or rather, spores. Last week she collected two kilogrammes of truffles; this week, even more. What started as a crackpot scheme, might, it transpires, be a money-spinner. But it will take time. The first hurdle is getting the landowners on side. Unlike in Italy, or France where you can go a-roaming, plucking flowers, mushrooms and berries wherever you want, here that could get you flung into gaol. So we have to tiptoe through the truffles.
Still, I feel I might have wronged The Bitch. When Tom first mooted the idea of buying a truffle hound to work in England, I just thought it was an excuse for him to go on holiday. There weren't truffles, so far as anybody knew then, in this country. I had been trying to get him to come with me to the Amalfi Coast for the past three years and failed; there always seemed to be beans to pick, ditches to be dug, pigs to feed. Brenda had succeeded where I had failed and he couldn't get enough of her.
So when he came back from his third trip, still with with no dog but with tales of merry evenings spent downing one Babette's feast after the next, I found myself trying not to feel bitter. Relations had got so strained that even a silver cup claiming that Brenda had been awarded first prize as best young Truffling Bitch in the whole of the Po Valley, failed to impress me. I just wondered where he'd got it made.
Still, here she is - a lookalike to Tin-tin's Snowy, who, when she howls at the moon recreates the sound of the Italian hilltop villages in our Somerset valley, but who possesses a nose that might end up saving us from destitution.
