06 Oct 2026
This month, Ruth reflects on how one tiny chihuahua has shaped her friendships, her home and her life in St Albans…
I have realised that there are two reliable ways to meet people in St Albans.
One is to have children. The other is to have a dog. I chose the three-kilo chihuahua route.
Van came to St Albans with me and has been conducting my introductions ever since. People I have never formally met shout his name across the street.
He stops dead outside Megan’s because he knows exactly what happens in there. He knows Silver Palate gives out the good samples. He knows he gets a treat at the Post Office if he is a good boy (spoiler: he is always a good boy). Van accepts all of this as entirely appropriate. In his tiny little head, he is celebrated down every street and in every establishment, every day.
There’s no doubt that having a dog changes your experience of a place. St Albans is not just a city I live in. It has become a special community populated by familiar dogs and the familiar faces attached to them. I’ve bonded with strangers simply because we’ve both stood beside two small animals inspecting the same hedge.
Without Van, there are people in St Albans I would have walked past for years. I am perfectly capable of talking to strangers without assistance, but Van changes the kind of conversations I end up having. He removes the formal bit at the beginning. It’s not hard for someone to think of an opening line when one person is holding a chihuahua wearing a red satin, fur-trimmed tutu.
Through him, unfamiliar faces became people I looked forward to seeing. The place we had moved to began to feel like ours.
Van even brokers international relations. Two very special people in my life, one from Colombia and one from South Africa, are there entirely because of him. Without Van, I would never have met them and I am very glad I did.
There are other friendships that started with a dog’s name before I knew the owner’s. Conversations that began on pavements continued over coffee.
People who were once “the woman with the cockapoo” became people with keys to my flat.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. Through Van, I have ended up with a small St Albans village of my own: familiar faces who know Van, look out for him and love him. I am more grateful for that than I could ever say. There is something deeply touching about people being kind to the creature you love most; often, their affection for him feels like affection for me too.
Being honest, Van’s impact on my life has not always been convenient. In fact, it’s almost never convenient.
Van has to be considered in almost every plan I make. A spontaneous night away is not particularly spontaneous when you first need to arrange childcare for a creature who weighs less than a handbag. Work trips involve lengthy negotiations and holidays require spreadsheets. There are people I trust with him and people I absolutely do not. I have turned down plans because I could not find anyone to look after him. I have rearranged evenings, crossed London early and spent more than I want to estimate on dog care.
There is no version of dog ownership in which love removes responsibility, and sometimes the responsibility is irritating.
I would like to be the sort of person who glides out of the house with a small suitcase and announces she is going to Paris, and in fairness, sometimes I am.
But the reality is that the gliding only comes after lots of planning and organising and is accompanied by many WhatsApps asking whether Van has eaten his dinner.
He has also made me worry in ways I did not anticipate. Have you ever lay in bed at two in the morning googling “my chihuahua has a strange cough and looks sad” because I can assure you, I have. More than once. I know when he is annoyed by the particular force with which he sighs. I know whether he wants food, attention or to go outside from the way he looks at me. And he knows me just as well.
Van has seen me sick and stressed. Through late night work calls and major life decisions, he has sat beside me. He has also watched Gilmore Girls more times than any dog reasonably should.
Being fully known by an animal is a weirdly intimate experience. In human relationships, we explain a lot. We tell people who we are, we describe what happened to us. We apologise and justify and interpret.
Van has simply observed me over the last eight years.
He knows the version of me who leaves the house looking polished for work and the version who comes back eight hours later and lies horizontally on the couch eating toast. He doesn’t love one version any more than the other, and that constancy has mattered more than I expected.
When I come home from work or collect him from my friends, Van is so completely delighted to see me that it borders on ridiculous. There is no attempt at dignity. His entire body becomes involved. It is difficult to feel small in the grand scheme of things when another living creature reacts to your arrival like this.
Our pets most beautiful gift is that they pull us into the ordinary business of living. They need breakfast regardless of whether we are heartbroken. They need to go outside when we are tired. They do not care if a meeting went badly or whether somebody texted back. They demand our attention in a way that is both inconvenient and immensely good for us. The world has to keep moving because they are in it.
Through writing this column, I am pushing myself to think more than usual about what makes a life feel full. The year before forty has apparently turned me into somebody who audits her own existence on a monthly basis. There are obvious things we are taught to count: relationships, houses, jobs, children, achievements. Animals don’t often come into that equation.
And yet, Van has shaped almost every part of the last eight years.
He has influenced where I go, who I know and the rhythm of my days.
He has been there during periods of enormous change while remaining magnificently uninterested in any of it. To him, I am not my job title or my relationship status.
I am the person who knows where the chicken is kept.
I still like the freedom in my life and I like being able to leave. Van has never changed that. He has simply changed what it feels like to come back. Usually, he is somewhere on the other side of the door.
Three kilos.
The sweetest little soul.
The love of my life.
