I don’t normally do the morning dog walk; it’s my wife’s thing. But we’re going away for the weekend straight afterwards, so on this particular Friday it makes sense for us to go together. The park is more or less on the way out of town. “Morning!” my wife sings, waving at someone in the car park. The person waves back, shouting something I can’t hear. My wife laughs. “I have a lot of friends in this park,” she says. “And also some enemies, but mostly friends.” It’s clearly true: over the course of half an hour my wife stops to chat with a dozen people: couples, singles, professional dog walkers, park employees. “You’re not used to this, are you?” she says to me. “The social whirl?” I say. “Just talking to people,” she says. “I don’t come this way,” I say. When I do the afternoon dog walk I tend to stick to a perimeter route that means I almost never meet anyone I know, although I do still run into people who know my dog. “It’s Jean!” they will shout. The dog will run up to these strangers, tail wagging, and they will exchange some customary greeting, or perhaps share an in-joke. Then the person will look me up and down suspiciously, give my dog a treat, and walk on. “Bye, Jean!” they call, over their shoulders. “Who was that?” I will say, once the dog and I are out of earshot. “How do you know them? What kind of car do they have?” The dog sneezes, shakes her head, and hares off down the path ahead, disappearing round the corner. From the other side of a stand of trees I will hear a distant cry: “Look, it’s Jean!” It can be humiliating to negotiate a landscape where