Stan, the spaniel who taught me to be happy again: TONY PARSONS lived in a big house in

We hadn’t meant to get a dog.

When our nine-year-old daughter Jasmine was home from school with an illness that was dragging on longer than anyone expected, we were willing to do just about anything to lift her spirits. Apart from the one thing that Jasmine really wanted us to do: get her a dog. My wife Yuriko and I were a lot like the man in that old Meat Loaf song. We would do anything for Jasmine – but we wouldn’t do that. 

So we tried to fob her off with a rabbit. ‘You know, Jas, a lovely, fluffy-eared bunny rabbit?’ Her face grew pale with outrage, and she quickly produced a list entitled ‘Five Reasons to Avoid Having a Rabbit as a Pet’. She had us at number one: ‘A rabbit will destroy your home’. (They chew – with teeth that never stop growing – everything.) 

In truth, it wasn’t the best moment for us to get a puppy. At the time, in 2012, I was failing and fading on every front, waking up at 4am and fretting about the next mortgage payment. Our house in Hampstead was deceptive because money was tight now and times were getting harder. The big house had a big mortgage. My formerly glittering career as a writer had lost its sheen. The success that had carried us to this house in this neighbourhood was in the increasingly distant past. In the working world, I was just about washed up.

A music journalist originally, I’d started writing books too. After a slow start, my novel Man and Boy eventually sold in the millions, the paperback made it to number one on the best-seller list and won the British Book of the Year prize in 2001.

But I quickly learnt that success wears off in both journalism and publishing. Your sales slip down. Your allies move on to new pastures. And the new people just can’t see the point of you. Time had knocked a lot of the confidence out of me, and all of the cockiness. I saw now how nothing is ever guaranteed, how you have never really made it. I had been a success. The world turned and now I was on the fast track to failure. Worst of all, I felt like I had let my family down.

My wife Yuriko had grown up with dogs, so she had some insight. ‘Life is better with a dog,’ she admitted. ‘And easier without one.’ But sometimes you decide that you want the life of your family to be better, not easier. 

And that’s when you get a dog.

Once we had adjusted to the idea, Yuriko and I began to debate which breed. I wanted a German shepherd – I had fond childhood memories of a neighbour’s alsatian; Yuriko had her heart set on a golden retriever, that gorgeous breed with their Debbie Harry fur and endlessly sweet nature. 

Jasmine scoffed at our total ignorance and tapped page 42 of her well-thumbed copy of What Dog? A Guide to Help New Owners Select the Right Breed for Their Lifestyle. She insisted there was only one candidate for our city family with easy access to the great green space of Hampstead Heath: a cavalier king charles spaniel. 

Jasmine’s extensive research revealed it was loving, easy-going and small. Gentle and courteous. Flexible. Happy chilling out at home – but with an unexpected sporting ancestry that meant it was more than capable of long walks on nearby Hampstead Heath. A dog that wants what you want. That all sounded pretty good.

The closest cavalier king charles spaniel breeder I could find that might possibly have a puppy for us was just outside Southampton. A drive of three hours there and three hours back. Not quite as much hassle as having a rabbit, but close. 

The breeders, Tony and Trish Cassidy, had Rudyard Kipling’s famous line about dogs on the home page of their website: 

Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware/Of giving your heart to a dog to tear. 

As it happened, they had a small litter – just two pups. Both boys. ‘We’ll drive down,’ I said to Trish on the telephone, all cheery ignorance, ‘and have a look at your dogs.’ 

‘No,’ Trish told me. ‘You drive down. And we’ll have a look at you.’

The house in Southampton was wall to wall cavalier king charles spaniels – capering, exploring, roaming, sniffing, snoozing. And barking. Especially barking. 

But I saw him as soon as we came through the door. Stan. He was a bandy-legged pup, six weeks old, with fur the colour of Rita Hayworth’s hair – impossibly lush, luscious red hair, the richest of reds, an iconic burnt ginger that seemed to shine from within. He took my breath away. It was love at first sight. 

The red of the ruby cavalier is meant to be an unbroken monochrome, a flawless field of luxuriant red loveliness. But Stan had a tiny, tiny touch of white on his chest, like a miniature dinner shirt, and a dab of white on his chin the size of a snowflake, and a thin white zigzag on top of his head, like the lightning bolt on a superhero’s Lycra chest. 

Those modest snow-white markings meant that Crufts was always going to be out for this lad. 

But he could not have been more perfect. 

He ambled over to us immediately, brushed his tiny snout – the colour and texture of a miniature black olive – against the back of Yuriko’s hand and flashed us a wary look. 

Who are you then? And why are you in my home? And what’s going on? 

Another family had already been down to view the two pups but they had found it impossible to choose between Stan and his brother Sam, so they went away to deliberate. ‘Try to get the red one,’ I whispered to Yuriko – more of a desperate gasp, really. That was the one for me. That was the only dog in the world. 

Then Stan completely ignored us for the rest of the visit. As brutal as that. He had sniffed Yuriko’s hand, sealed the deal, made us fall hopelessly and forever in love, booked a lifetime in Hampstead, London NW3, and then sauntered off as if he had other, far more important business to attend to. 

Most dogs have their names changed from the ones the breeder gives them. Stan’s brother Sam would later become Hendricks – like the gin, not the guitarist. But there was never any question about changing our dog’s name. Stan sounded like somebody’s old uncle – and that’s what we always loved about his name. Apart from our dog, it feels like nobody has been called Stan since about 1943. 

We went back six days later, taking Jasmine to meet her new dog, and again a week after that to finally bring Stan, by then eight weeks old, home with us. Trish the breeder cried as we were leaving, hugging Stan close (we later learned that Trish cries for every pup that leaves for its new life) and gave him a tiny yellow duckling toy to remember them by. 

On the long drive back to London, Stan sat in his basket in the back seat, his eyes wide with bewilderment as he hurtled down the motorway towards his new life. There was a small travel clock tucked inside his blanket, meant to imitate the heartbeat of the family he was leaving. It seemed to be working. He was quite calm. 

When we got him back to our house he took a brief tour of the living room, never straying far from the walls. By now he realised that something was a bit odd. But wait, he seemed to be thinking, hold on just a moment. This is not home. Where’s Mum? Where’s SAM? WHERE IS MY BROTHER SAM?  

That night, when we left Stan alone in his basket and turned off the light, he cried. It was a comfy basket, in a roomy cage with the yellow duckling Trish had given him close by his side, and the travel clock still tucked inside his blanket, going tick-tock-tick-tock just like his brother Sam’s heartbeat, and there was a hot water bottle slipped in to simulate the warmth of bedding down with the pack. 

But Stan still cried as if his heart were breaking. We had been warned that he would cry for the loss of everything he had ever known, and we were advised that we should ignore those grief-stricken sobs. And, with tears in our eyes, we did as we had been instructed. We turned off all the lights, and we closed all the doors. 

It was the most heartbroken sound in the world, and it drifted through our home and our hearts for what felt like many hours. At some point in the middle of the night, Stan finally fell asleep, emotionally spent, physically exhausted, totally knackered. But, of course, Yuriko and I stayed wide awake, the echo of his terrible grief still ringing in our guilty souls. Stan slept in his basket the next night, too. And he cried again. And again we stayed awake long after he had stopped crying. 

The great compensation for Stan’s cries in the night and our exhaustion came with the morning. When we looked at him, and when we held him, and when we watched how he could totally lose himself in whatever he was doing, here was the priceless reward. 

Despite all the work he created and the mess he produced when he was at peak puppy, there was a quiet joy he bestowed upon everyone he met. He made us smile all the time. The sound of him noisily drinking water. His snoring. The way he tilted his head to one side and then the other when contemplating some mystery of the universe that he could not quite solve. He swiftly became part of our family. More than this, he became the family’s most popular member.

Stan soon somehow sensed there was a big wide world beyond the front door, but he was not allowed out of the house just yet, which made him stir-crazy. He had to have two more rounds of vaccinations and then wait one more week after the second jab – seven days that seemed to last a lifetime. He was coming up to 12 weeks old when Jasmine and I finally put on his brand-new collar and lead and opened the front door. 

Even once on the Heath, we did not trust him off the lead. He was too precious, and he was too wild, and we were too scared of losing him. So we walked him with the longest training lead in the world, held by Jasmine. Stan always had a special affection for Jasmine. He understood, I think, that she was the reason he was with us. 

We had been living in Hampstead for ten years but it was only when we got Stan that we really started to feel like part of the neighbourhood. To really belong, you had to have a dog. They were welcomed, lauded and loved in every corner of Hampstead. A new world opened up as soon as we got Stan. People suddenly talked to us. Age, race, gender – none of it mattered. We were suddenly part of an all-inclusive dog-loving fraternity. 

When Stan and I had dropped Jasmine off at school, we would stroll up to the Village. One day a man who looked just like Ricky Gervais stopped to compliment Stan on his beauty. And it was Ricky Gervais. Ricky, a long-term Hampstead resident, is in the end just a bloke from Reading who loves dogs. 

You get used to seeing celebrities in Hampstead. It’s not a big deal. You see them every day, but they don’t rate a second look, or even a first. They mooch about undisturbed and unmolested. But if a dog is present then you talk to them, and they talk to you. 

I walked into Fred’s gym one day and there was Fred doing leg exercises with the queen – Imelda Staunton of The Crown, Hampstead resident, dame of the realm and, more importantly, owner of a lovely cairn terrier called Molly. 

A cocky-looking border terrier could often be seen strolling down the high street as if he owned it, strolling in and out of the mobile phone shops as if he was curious about the latest iPhone. Stan watched this gloriously free border terrier with frank admiration. His owner came ambling after him – Jon Moss, the drummer of Culture Club. 

I had seen Jon Moss about before I had a dog, but there had been no earthly reason for small talk. Then suddenly we were dog friends. Suddenly we were all on first-name terms – Jon and Casper (the independent border terrier) and Tony and Stan. 

The first dog that I ever met in Hampstead was a golden labrador retriever called Hippie, who was George Michael’s dog in the twilight days of Wham! and the early years of George’s solo success with the album Faith. 

I was co-writing George’s autobiography with him at the time so I was constantly driving to George’s house in Oak Hill Park, NW3, to talk to him for our book. Often I would turn up and have to wait until George and Hippie returned from the Heath, where they would go in George’s Range Rover every day for walkies. 

At the time George was probably the biggest star in music. But you did not really get a sense of his stardom because he was always so down to earth. He was young, healthy, happy and his dreams had all come true. He had more money than he would ever be able to spend. The great songs were pouring out of him. 

But most of all, this was a great time in George Michael’s life because of Hippie. The dog gave George’s days structure and joy and made his house a home. The house on Oak Hill Park was a huge, modern, open-plan structure – the real-life white palace that the setting for the video of A Different Corner was clearly based on. It had big glass walls and white wall-to-wall carpet everywhere, which Hippie systematically destroyed. The once-pristine carpet was chewed, stained and had clumps missing where Hippie had attempted to bury something, or to dig something up. George just chuckled at Hippie’s carpet-shredding antics. He loved that dog. And Hippie loved him back. 

But Hippie’s love was constant. Hippie would have loved George even if Faith was in the remainder rack at HMV. 

Unlike everyone else in our lives, our dogs love us unconditionally. Unlike our friends, family and lovers – even great friends, even beloved family, even the love of your life – dogs love without all those caveats, without all those get-out clauses and without unspoken reservations. Dogs love us – and they love us whether we warrant their love or not. 

A dog’s love is, quite simply, unbreakable. 

Which is just as well, because as Stan and I became a familiar fixture in the Village, my career continued to move fast, all of it downhill. My two sources of income – journalism and books – were both going the way of Woolworth’s. In 20 years, I had gone from being a washed-up music journalist to being a washed-up novelist. Which was progress of a sort. But I was down at heel, over the hill and badly in need of a hit. 

A year before we got Stan, I’d had a drink with the director Sir Sam Mendes. He was working on the new James Bond film at the time, Skyfall, and he talked about how much he had loved the Ian Fleming books as a kid, and how he was rereading them all now to try to capture the author’s grit in a 007 film for the first time ever. 

Sam’s feelings about the Bond books so totally reflected my own love for those same books at exactly the same age that I decided to reread them all myself when I got home that night. 

Before I had even finished the first page of Casino Royale, I knew that this was what I wanted to do – to create a series hero, like James Bond or Sherlock Holmes or Jack Reacher or Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. I thought if I did it well enough, the readers would be there. It might extend my career for another ten years. At the other end of this short, sweet life, it could even be a source of income for Yuriko after I fell off my perch. 

The downside was that I would be starting again as an author with a new genre, so I’d be writing without the safety net of a publishing contract. I would need to cash in our savings and have the bottle to invest in myself. ‘Do it,’ Yuriko said. ‘If you think you can – I believe in you.’ 

The year went by. The book – and my hero – grew in my head and heart. Spring and summer came and went, and I began to sketch it out. I knew one thing for certain about my book’s hero. He was definitely going to have a dog called Stan.

From walking Jasmine to school, to exploring a part of the Heath he had never seen before, to meeting his golden retriever friends on a Sunday morning, to dozing by my desk while I worked – Stan loved it all. I would hear him snoring next to the radiator in my office, and I knew that the very last thing in his head was what may or may not happen at some point in the future. It was more than a love of life. It was a love of right here, right now – a love of the living moment. 

We – human beings – spend our entire lives waiting for our hopes and prayers to be answered with some better tomorrow, for the frustration and anxiety of right now to be behind us, for all the red lights to turn green. But for Stan – and for all dogs – the lights were permanently green, always and for ever. He relished the moment he was living in. He loved it. He immersed himself in it.

Going for a walk? Sounds good! Staying home? Now you’re talking! 

That was his great gift – being present. Stan taught me to try to live more in the living, fleeting moment. There would be more lessons to come in the years ahead, because our animals teach us how to be human. But being present – here was Stan’s first great lesson. 

Wherever he was, it was exactly the right place to be. And if I was smart enough to follow his example, my dog would show me how to be happy. 

Adapted from Man & Dog: A Love Story by Tony Parsons (DK Red, £20), to be published September 10. © Tony Parsons 2026. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 20/09/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.