Deborah Hill-Cone: I so miss him my delinquent mate

The house seems empty without Spotty.

First Dad, now it’s farewell to a beloved four-legged friend ... My life has become a country music song.

It's weird, writing a column like this. It is impossible to write anything if I think about who is going to read it.

I can just hear them saying: "Oh, she's not writing about more blinking personal drama is she?"

Well, yes. My life truly has become a maudlin country music song. Last week I wrote about my dad dying. Then a day after my dad's wake, I had to have Spotty, the Dalmatian dog who had been part of our family for 13 years, put down. (This week is going to be better, really. Stay tuned.)

We knew Spotty had cancer, but he still seemed to have a good quality of life, doing his rocking-horse run at Meola Reef and weeing on my neighbours' topiary. I needed someone to tell me how I would know when the time had come to farewell him.

There was no-one. It was all up to me. So, this is what being a grown-up feels like. Burying your father and knowing when it is time to take your dog to the vet.

In the end it happened suddenly. I just knew Spotty was shivering and I rushed him to the after-hours vet in the Bay of Islands, crying all the way. Now he is gone and our house feels so empty.

I feel almost guilty at how much I miss Spotty's velvet ears and nudgy wet nose, when I should be thinking about my dad. Spotty was just a dog, I have to remind myself. And he was a terrible dog, really.

A delinquent hound. He flunked obedience school. He was a canine Bertie Wooster. "Mentally negligible but with a heart of gold".

He sniffed bottoms. There was a special embarrassed laugh visitors would do as Spotty shoved his nose in their crotch. "Ooh, Spotty!" Me: "Sorry. He does it to everyone." He did legendary farts.

He once ate a hat. A whole hat. I had to buy a special sort of vacuum cleaner to pick up his dog hair equal opportunity shedding: black hair on white things, and white hair on black things.

Spotty ate everything, including annoyingly, half a pair of Manolos. He ran away a lot. Once he turned up at the High Court.

Another time don't ask me why - I took him to a cocktail party at Eric Watson's mansion in Karaka where the Candy Lane dancers, in fishnet tights were greeting guests with trays of champagne. As we pulled up outside, Spotty managed to get out of the car and ran into the lighted-up mansion full of glamorous people I watched from outside, palm pressed to my forehead, as he raced about causing mayhem like a slapstick movie. Eventually I managed to get him back into the car, then I strolled insouciantly into the party. Not my dog!

My husband used to feed Spotty marmalade toast at the breakfast table. "If it's good enough for the Queen to do it ... "

In retrospect, having Spotty sleeping on the bed between us was probably not conducive to marital relations. But when my marriage ended Spotty was a most comforting presence.

If only everyone was a bit more like Spotty: so naughty but so forgiving. There was something about having his friendly presence nearby that was so soothing. I was never really alone.

I could learn a thing or two from Spotty. The neuroscientist Josef Parvizi coined the term "corticocentric bias" to describe the way we think we are better than animals. "Congratulating ourselves on having risen above our unthinking impulse-driven animal cousins through long evolutionary advancement." Ha freaking ha to that.

Spotty was always "in the moment". Like GK Chesterton's dog Quoodle, I imagined he could sense the brave smell of a stone and the smell of dew and thunder.

Dogs can make the most stoic of us sentimental. Pablo Neruda farwelled his dog. "I, the materialist, who never believed in any promised heaven in the sky for any human being, I believe in a heaven I'll never enter. Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship."

Spotty was always pleased to see me. Goodbye my Spotty friend.

Toughen-up advocates hiding hurt

We are all fragile creatures. Those who deny this - who say "children are more resilient than we give them credit for" - are possibly the most fragile, unaware of their own vulnerability.

The people who think the King's College hazing incident is "no big deal" are the ones most in need of compassion and empathy. They have squashed their own hurt and pain and hidden it away, which is why they find other people's pain impossible to tolerate. Bullies don't realise they are bullies, do they?

Influential psychoanalyst Alice Miller, who revolutionised the way we understand childhood trauma, revealed how children adapt to even unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb.

"The repression of brutal abuse experienced during childhood drives many people to destroy their lives and the lives of others.

"In an unconscious thirst for revenge, they may engage in acts of violence ... using this destruction to hide the truth from themselves and avoid feeling the despair of the tormented child they once were."

Miller's seminal work, The Drama of the Gifted Child, should be required reading for the board of King's College.