Olive, Mabel & Me: Life and Adventures with Two Very Good Dogs, by Andrew Cotter

The Covid-19 lockdowns that took over most of the world in early 2020 will be pulled apart and analyzed by historians and social commentators for the next half-century, no doubt, and then likely spotlit again in a hundred years’ time at the outset of the next global pandemic, just like we all looked back and relearned about the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1920.

I won’t dwell on the horror. We all saw it, and experienced it. Families lost members in numbers too painfully large to contemplate. The world lost major personalities to an illness that respected neither wealth nor fame. The anxiety and uncertainty were heavy and numbing. Kids lost irreplaceable educational and social experiences, and I know from personal experience in my own family that those losses will never be recovered, and will leave lifelong scars.

But do we ignore the good that may have happened alongside all that bad? I spent Canada’s various periods of lockdown in a kind of unexpected early retirement in rural Northern Ontario, in a hamlet of 1400 people, called Thessalon.

The panic of early lockdown saw my family pack our city lives into the car and drive eight hours north to a small house we’d bought years before… for retirement. We thought we’d be in Thessalon for a couple of weeks. We lived there for the better part of two years. While there, I walked my 10,000 steps a day usually before 9 am and always with my dog Birdy at my side. Birdy and I trudged our way through snow and ice, spring rains, summer heat, and blissful autumn chill. I grew, harvested, preserved, and prepared food in a natural rhythm I didn’t know I’d ever learn. For me — and certainly for Birdy — the lifestyle shift, while abrupt and unnerving, offered gifts.

I continued to work my job every day from a hastily prepared remote office, like so many of my desk-work compatriots. In fact, given the nature of my job heading up the staff at The Writers’ Union of Canada, I would say 2020 through 2023 were the busiest years of my career. Turns out writers do not pump the brakes when a global health emergency threatens their lives and livelihoods; rather, they hit the accelerator and write even more. Membership in the Union grew by at least 25% during the pandemic, and the work our fabulous staff used to do in a very studied, regimented way at scheduled in-person meetings, seminars, and conferences became necessarily ad hoc, spontaneous, and remote. It was suddenly injected with a nowness and immediacy that made each day an exciting discovery of new ways to make things work for the creative process.

But before my workday began and then again when it was over, I giddily accepted the gift of living in an elemental landscape of fresh air, abundant wildlife, natural social distance, and a soothing slow pace measured in seasons rather than hours. Our kids — separated from friends and their familiar, comforting structure — remember it all very differently, I’m sure; and my lovely wife Julia will always be more a city than a country mouse. But I don’t think I can apologize for the tonal, spiritual shift I experienced when the world ordered us to stay in small bubbles away from everyone else. That, it turns out, is where I want to be.

I doubt I’m introducing any of my readers to Olive and Mabel, the black and yellow labrador duo who came along on social media at just exactly the moment we all needed them to be there. The phenomenon of their virality is well documented. The sudden fame of Andrew Cotter, beyond his already appreciative audience of British sports enthusiasts, was an event that hardly needs a barely-read blog post to highlight. But for those who may have moved on and forgotten, have a look:

This inaugural Olive and Mabel video is dated at March 27, 2020, which by my records is exactly ten days into my family’s residency on Lake Huron’s north shore. I don’t remember exactly when I first saw the breakfasting competition, but it must have been very soon after it was initially uploaded. I was terminally online at the time, working through each day on a laptop on the dining table, and then checking every available social channel in the off hours to get some sense of where the world was going and what might be left for us all when the light returned. If I had to guess, I’d say the video link came to me via my childhood neighbour Janet Somerville, who also owns a black and a yellow lab, and who no doubt would have been right on top of this video’s debut.

I sent the link to everyone… family, friends, co-workers, probably international colleagues around the world. And I waited for every new edition of the adventures of Olive and Mabel much as I used to wait for new volumes in a favoured book series. The premise was hokey and charming in a slightly embarrassing dad-humour way. And I loved it. Often overlooked, I believe, in Olive and Mabel appreciation is just how much some of us were missing live sports commentary. I readily admit that on my first viewing of the video, I DID NOT get the joke. I was simply hooked by Andrew Cotter’s expert play-by-play and perfect commentary voice. For me the race to the finish of the breakfast bowls of kibble, or who would get the bone toy in the end, was very real, and totally gripping.

So, a couple years later, Julia gifted me this volume, and here we are now at the reading stage. Would we know this book and these two dogs without the pandemic lockdowns, and Cotter’s surprise virality. Never. Of course not. I would guess Andrew Cotter was surprised by a phone call one day, and by the end of that conversation an agent had convinced him there was a lucrative book contract to be had. I hope the money he was offered fattened his retirement plan. He brought a brief window of sunshine to millions in a very dark hour, and he deserves just reward — the kind of substantial monetary reward online video virality probably doesn’t deliver on its own. What a weird gift of the global information age, though, this opportunity to learn more about the lives of two dogs I will never meet in person.

Olive and Mabel are canine athletes in a way my own Birdy (and now Samwich, a late addition to the family) will never be, and not just because I have no capacity for play-by-play and certainly no broadcasting voice. Andrew Cotter seems to have a passion for climbing very tall hills in Scotland, and bringing his two labs all the way to the top with him. I’ve no doubt Samwich and Birdy would put their best effort into such a climb. I’ve certainly seen Birdy bound up steep trails while I labour behind her. But my dogs are disadvantaged by having me and not Cotter as a companion. While I like a good long, level walk in the countryside, I’m more of an admire-the-mountain-from-the-pub-at-the-bottom sort of climber.

This book is allowing me to look backward to an odd yet unexpectedly fulfilling time, and simultaneously gaze forward to my many — hopefully great many — remaining years of dog companionship.

“…Olive… focused, relentless, tasting absolutely nothing…”

—Andrew Cotter, The Dog’s Breakfast Grand Finale.