Dog Day Afternoon

So: I shark into Westminster underground, past a row of Evening Standard posters that read: "Sniffer Dogs to Patrol Tube", duck through the ticket gates- and walk straight into a detective out patrolling with his sniffer dogs. It's a photo op, of course. There's a news cameraman spread out on the ground before one dog, encouraging it to snuffle at his lens; he wants the final shot of the report, where the journalist gets to use his witty tag line, and they cut back to the grinning anchorman. Even if you didn't see the cameras, you'd notice that these dogs (I think they are springer spaniels) look exceptionally well groomed. You can't help but feel that this is the telly totty of the police-dog world, and that there's a pitbull with the nose of a perfumier tied to a railing out the back. The banker ahead of me is told to lay his sports bag on the ground and one of the spaniels sniffs it daintily. "Good boy," says the policeman softly, and the banker says "Thank you".

This is towards the close of a long day. About eight hours earlier I'm sitting in a busy street, drinking coffee with Charlie and chatting away about the countryside. Charlie's a decent guy, and modest too; I knew him for months before he ever mentioned his sideline as a stuntsman. Because he's quite slight, he's mostly cast as some kind of doomed child, though he sometimes plays women too: he spent most of last weekend in a wig and pregnancy suit, falling out of a Stena lift for a BBC sitcom. This was an unusual job for him: most of time he works on soaps and advertisements. Casualty and Crimewatch are lifelines. Work on a drama series is the best, he says. By the time you get there, the cast and crew have been living in each others' pockets for weeks, and the place is like a pit of snakes. You turn up, fall off a ladder, and suddenly everyone's your friend. It's like the day the circus comes to town.

Like most people who do extraordinary things, Charlie's an eminently practical guy. But there are no limits to his practicality- it's boundless, almost fundamentalist; he'll try anything as long as he thinks it's do-able. Like the time he wanted a garden, and decided he would build one in his room.
"I needed the space to walk around," he says. "This is before I had the wife and kids. I was on my own and thought: I'll go mad without a garden! I had to make one in the bedroom in the end."
"How did you go about that?"
"It was fairly straightforward. I put tarpaulin down, covered it up with soil and fertilizer, and then just planted away."
"How much soil did you need?"
"Too much," Charlie says. "That was the expensive part. About two carloads full. It was a huge room, much bigger than I thought. At first I was looking to get away with a sprinkle on the ground, but I ended up going about a foot, a foot and a half deep? Up as far as the lip of the pond."
"You had a pond?"
"Ah, yeah. Nothing too fancy, though. You know those plastic pond moulds you can buy? Just filled one up with water, threw in a few fish, and there you go."
"And the garden itself?"
"Mostly grass; grass from seed. Planted a couple of flowers, a few trees. Miniatures. Not bonzai, but miniatures. Shrubs that looked like trees. I was going to roll out some turf, but I thought that was going a bit far. It looked quite nice, though. I had one of those daylight bulbs, and you could just walk in there, put on a rainforest tape, with the frogs and the rain and the thunder in the distance, and it was like a different world."
"How long did you keep it?"
"Only a few months. Had to throw it out in the end. The soil was always muddy because the water wouldn't drain. Cutting the grass was a nightmare too. I had to go around the room, on my knees, with a little pair of scissors. And then about July the flies came out. You know those tiny little black flies?"
"I know those flies," I say. "I stayed in a flat once, where vegetables went off in the kitchen, and those flies were everywhere."
"All of a sudden," Charlie says. "Suddenly they appear."
"Just like that," I say. "That's the kind of flies they are."
"And I don't know where they came from," Charlie says.
"The thing is, you can't get rid of them," I say.
"The thing is, they keep on coming back," Charlie says. "I sprayed them with insect spray and all."
"They probably hatched out of the soil," I say. "The eggs were probably in it all along."
"That's what I thought too," he says. "I sprayed a couple of times, but no effect."
"No use?" I say.
"They kept on coming back," Charlie says.
There is a lengthy pause.
"Plus you get sick of sleeping on top of the wardrobe after a while," Charlie says.
I look out the window at the heavy traffic. Rush hour is just beginning. In twenty minutes these roads will be jammed. Above us, airplanes are stacked in a holding pattern, waiting for clearance.
"Yeah," I say. "I guess maybe you do."