At about 7.20 every morning I take our two Deerhounds for a run. They are brother and sister, very large and easy to care for. They love running but they love snoozing and generally lying about even more. The only problem is their coats. Cross a sheep with a grey wire scouring pad and you begin to get the picture – and the problem.

Actually there is another problem – Milo and fizz hate being brushed. In fact all deerhounds hate it (it’s an insult to their dignity) unless you give them cheese to eat at the same time and that can become expensive given how much brushing is involved. The fact is that most owners simply don’t bother unless they plan to show. And since showing involves giving up your life and that of your family, liquidating your assets, giving up work and buying a gypsy caravan to take you round the country for 6 months of every year, most deerhound owners don’t show – well not us sane ones anyway.

Back to the coat.

It takes about an hour and a half to groom a Deerhound that has been left a little too long. It takes about an hour to groom a deerhound once a month. It takes about a minute to groom a Deerhound once a day. In that light I could say that Fizz and Milo embody the dos and don’ts of maintaining relationships and intimate communication. By intimate I not only mean the conversations that we have within our most personal relationships but to those that we can have with colleagues with whom we have developed what we might call a special relationship. A situation which enables either person to raise even awkward topics so openly and honestly that there is very little risk of the input being met with anything more obstructive than moderate awkwardness (a red face or a bit of fidgeting!).

The ritual of brushing the dogs daily (I actually stroke them at the same time to take their minds off the wiry brush), whether I perceive that I have the time or not, works on many levels. (Incidentally, this morning I swore that I did not have time and yet still brushed for two minutes. Was I late for my first appointment? No, of course I wasn’t – it was only two minutes).

After two weeks of the daily campaign:

1. The hounds look great.
2. Milo and Fizz are staring to like being brushed – or at least to dislike it less.
3. I don’t berate myself multiple times a day for not brushing the dogs.
4. I feel proud every time I see them because I am caring for them properly.
5. I appreciate them and their presence more; they now receive more attention, through the day, than ever before.
6. They seem to respond to a call to heal even more quickly than before.
7. I have stopped making promises that I know I will not/cannot back-up – “I really will brush you properly this weekend…”
8. Lots of minute and apparently insignificant efforts (positive and negative) stack up remarkably quickly.
9. I have realised that there are a great many tiny things that I can do to make life go better for me and for others.

Most of us, by the time we attain a certain age, will claim to be competent at conducting positive, deep, relationships and performing all of the skills that are required to stay ‘in relationship’ with the people around us more widely. But the point is not whether we know what it takes, it is whether we do what it takes. Do we really behave as if we mean to make progress with the people we spend time with, professionally and personally? Or do we tend to operate on the literal, factual level with them, trusting against all logic and experience, that the relationship will simply look after itself, and even improve over time – just like the coat on a large, shaggy dog?