I don’t know if you’ve ever gone to Hampstead Heath, on the first sunny day of the year, with a nine-week-old puppy. If you haven’t, I recommend the practice hugely – particularly if you are dying, or depressed, or even just slightly damp from melancholy.
For it seems – if you stand near the café, trying to work out how to attach a tiny, wriggling fur glove to a lead – that you have actually solved every problem in the world. You have cured not only your own unhappiness, but the unhappiness of every living soul you encounter. For the duration of this walk, you are the Louis Pasteur of souls. And your puppy? Your puppy is a device that makes people lose their minds.