9781529918595 by Smakprov Media AB

‘A love story’ DAILY MAIL

‘A daily dose of hope’ JOJO MOYES

‘Fills me with joy’ NIALL HARBISON

RORY CELLAN-JONES

Rory Cellan-Jones was the BBC’s principal technology correspondent until 2021, when he retired after forty years at the corporation. Rory hosts Movers and Shakers, the UK Broadcasting Press Guild 2024 ‘Podcast of the Year’, about life with Parkinson’s disease, with Jeremy Paxman, Gillian Lacey-Solymar, Mark Mardell, Paul Mayhew-Archer and Sir Nicholas Mostyn. His writing on medical innovation, technology and his beloved Romanian rescue dog, Sophie, can be found on Substack and on social media, where he posts as @rorycj.bsky.social and @RoryCellan under #sophiefromromania. In June 2024, Rory was awarded an OBE in recognition of his services to journalism.

RORY CELLAN-JONES

Sophie from Romania

What a rescue dog taught me about patience, love and hope

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For all the world’s rescue dogs and the brave souls who care for them

Welcome

There is a moment in just about every conversation I have with anyone I meet these days when they ask the same question. Sometimes it is the very ﬁrst thing they say, perhaps shouting it across the street as I hurry to the station. Some slip it into the middle of a conversation, a little embarrassed – ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking but . . .’ Others wait right until the end, often insisting, ‘I can’t let you go without asking . . .’ or ‘my wife/husband/daughter/boss would never forgive me if I didn’t ask . . .’ I never mind this question, partly because it’s the same thing I ask my wife when I call home from a trip away: ‘So, how is Sophie getting along?’

Welcome then to all those who have ever asked that question and to the thousands who follow the adventures of our Romanian rescue dog Sophie. This book is for you, a way of thanking you for your interest in our beautiful pet and for the kind words of encouragement you have sent us as we try to take her on a journey away from fear.

If you had told me a few years ago that one day I would write a book about a dog, I would have been certain that you had me mixed up with someone else. No, as the Technology Correspondent of the BBC , my job was to think about the latest smartphones, developments in artiﬁcial intelligence and

quantum computing, the battle against disinformation and online bullying. I might write about the occasional robot dog, and with the advent of Covid lockdowns, I began to make regular mention on social media of our beloved Collie cross Cabbage, my daily companion for walks, until her death in January 2022. But what expertise did I have to write a whole book when I could barely tell a Whippet from a West Highland Terrier?

Then, in December 2022, twelve months after I left the BBC after a forty-year career, Sophie came into our home. It quickly became clear that she was going to be a very important part of a post-retirement life that was already far busier than I had anticipated. I started keeping a daily diary recording her progress – or lack of it – and documenting the emotional rollercoaster of living with such a nervous animal.

And because I made the choice to talk about Sophie on social media, creating the hashtag #sophiefromromania, she has also attracted a hugely loyal and supportive audience on Twitter (or X as it became known during the writing of this book) and Instagram. Soon, I was ﬁnding that if I had not posted a new photo of Sophie by 9 am, her vast community of online fans was getting anxious.

As a very early user of Twitter, I already had a large following but I watched in amazement as my audience grew by more than 100,000 in the six months following the arrival of our new dog – and they weren’t there for my views on the latest gadgets or pictures of my sourdough loaves. It was a similar story on Instagram where I started with a much lower follower count of around 5,000 and saw it climb tenfold in the year after I began posting photos of Sophie.

So you will hear plenty in this book about how this devoted

Welcome

online community reacted to each moment in the story of our Romanian rescue dog. I make no apology for that because in the era before Twitter and Instagram came along, the whole story would have been very di erent. We would never have met our wonderful dog behaviourist Si Wooler who ﬁrst contacted me via a Twitter direct message. Television and radio programmes around the world would not have beaten a path to our door because they would never have even heard of Sophie. And instead of being buoyed up and unfailingly supported by warm and lovely messages from hundreds of thousands of Sophie fans, ready to rejoice at every sign of progress and commiserate with every setback, we would have felt we were very much on our own.

I am sure that our friends would have tried to be supportive but, with very few dog people among them, I am equally certain that most would have asked themselves what on earth we were doing, persevering with a dog that was terriﬁed of visitors and would never go out. Without the daily moral support and interest of you, Sophie’s fanbase and followers, who knows whether we would have persisted with our beautiful but painfully anxious rescue dog?

You will also hear from some of the thankfully few negative voices on social media, those whose apparent purpose in checking in for Sophie updates was to be relentlessly critical of what we were doing. They thought – and had no qualms in letting us know – that we were going down the wrong path with her and should just ‘get on with it’ – clip a lead on her collar and drag her out to the local park. While I was clear that the patient approach advocated by our advisor, Si Wooler, was the right one, these messages served to undermine my resolve and feed my anxiety that Sophie would never be able to experience the

things ‘normal’ dogs enjoy, such as going for a walk or chasing squirrels in the park. It is important to recognise that there is still an ongoing debate among animal experts about the best way to treat a fearful dog, even while Si’s methods reﬂect what is now mainstream.

Because much of my desire for a canine companion was informed by the medical imperative to be more active, what you will also encounter in these pages is a lot of talk about Parkinson’s disease. We acquired Sophie around four years after I had been diagnosed with the incurable degenerative brain condition. I was coping with my symptoms pretty well at the time but my hope was that a new dog would act as an important support in helping me maintain my physical and mental health, by making me get out early each morning for a walk. Sadly, that did not happen – in 2023 at least – and I became a little more hindered by my Parkinson’s as the year progressed.

Nevertheless, I knew I could not blame Sophie. Indeed, as the months progressed the bond between us grew deeper, as I came to understand just how frightened she was by the world she found herself in, so di erent from the one she had inhabited for the ﬁrst year of her life. Because of her, I sought out, met and learned from the owners of other Romanian rescue dogs whose stories are scattered through this book.

As in any relationship, there have been ups and downs for me and Sophie: moments of joy as she made some big breakthrough, such as o ering me a paw or snuggling up in her bed for the ﬁrst time; moments of deep frustration, even despair, on my part when she retreated back into her shell and refused to engage with any of us. This book will give a sense of all this too. Above all, however, this is a story about loving patience and what it can achieve, and about how three of us – me, my wife

Welcome

Diane and Si – managed over time to show Sophie she was safe and had ﬁnally found her home.

Like many a good love story, this one began just before Christmas, when a stranger from far away arrived at our home in the dead of night . . .

Rory Cellan-Jones

Chapter One

Special Delivery

Meeting Sophie Cellan-Jones

‘Love the dog you have, not the dog you thought you wanted.’

Instagram user @pembertonlismore

17

December 2022

It is just after midnight on the Saturday before Christmas and, despite going to bed several hours earlier, I am wide awake and checking my phone for the latest updates on a delivery we are expecting. When my wife Diane and I had gone to bed at 10 pm, we had been told to expect it around 5 am but I see now that the schedule has been updated – we should now be ready, we are told, at the ungodly hour of 0300 hrs. I peer out of the bedroom window onto our quiet street in a West London suburb. Christmas lights are twinkling in a number of the houses, and a few windows are lit up as part of a street Advent calendar organised by one of our neighbours.

Giving up on sleep, I slip on some jeans and a sweater over my pyjamas on this freezing night and, careful not to wake Diane, head downstairs to wait. So, what is it that has got me, a man in his sixties with a tremor in his right hand and knees that creak as he descends each step, as excited as a six-year-old

waiting for Santa Claus? No, not a model railway or a games console. The much-anticipated delivery that has me sitting now on the bottom stair, checking the time on my phone every ﬁve minutes, is of a dog. A dog called Sophie.

That was not her name when we picked her out at the end of November, some three weeks earlier, from the pet profiles on the website of a Romanian rescue charity. The dog that Diane zeroed in on was a one-year-old with a very sweet, rather sad face; below her photo was a caption that read, ‘Seven loves everybody and is just looking for her forever home.’ ‘Exactly what we need,’ I thought, as we filled out the application papers. Like Diane, I thought she seemed perfect except for one thing: her name. I could not imagine myself running around the park after her shouting, ‘Seven! Seven!’, like some over-excited judge from Strictly Come Dancing. We had a family meeting to choose an alternative, and my daughter-in-law suggested Sophie, after the loveable if somewhat undisciplined mongrel rescue dog her parents had owned until she died of old age a couple of years previously. It seemed ideal, with an Eastern European flavour about it – and so Seven became Sophie. We’d been told in the interim a little about her background – she had been discovered abandoned with other puppies by the roadside in a Romanian village. The vet who had found her handed Sophie and several of the other abandoned puppies over to her elderly father who kept them in a barn for several months. We ‘met’ Sophie via a video clip in which she seemed pretty lively, jumping up at what appeared to be the sleeve of the man caring for her.

At the beginning of December we signed a form promising to look after her well and return her to the rescue organisation if things didn’t work out, and then uploaded a couple of pictures of our garden to show it was suitable for a dog. The paperwork complete at our end, we were told that getting together the

various documents needed to satisfy the Romanian and British authorities would take a couple of weeks, but that we should have Sophie before Christmas. A week on came the news that she would arrive on Thursday, 15 December. A few days before this ‘due date’, we included a visit to a pet store in our round of Christmas shopping and bought food, a harness, and a lovely new bed. When our old dog Cabbage died at the beginning of the year we were so grief-stricken, we threw everything of hers out. Since then, the house had felt strangely empty but now Sophie’s bed was installed next to the Christmas tree, and we could not wait to see it occupied.

In the end the schedule slipped a little, as we were told that there’d be a couple of days’ delay, but that Sophie had now been picked up from the farm in a remote part of rural Romania which had been her temporary home. From there she was taken to Bucharest to join around ﬁfty other dogs being taken in three vans to new homes in the UK . We then joined a WhatsApp group where we got updates on her progress from the young team escorting the dog convoy. By the morning of Friday, 16 December they had reached the Eurotunnel depot at Calais. Then came the joyful news that all the dogs had passed their health checks, along with a photo of them lined up in front of bowls tucking into a meal. We couldn’t see Sophie, but all her companions looked pretty cheerful despite the rigours of the trip.

It was early evening before we learned that they had arrived in Kent, with the escorts promising to give us an ETA update once they had had something to eat. When it came through, we learned that our rescue was going to be dog number eight of twenty-one to be dropped o , arriving at our home at around 5 am after the van had been across Kent and Surrey, up to Milton Keynes and Bedford and then back down to West London.

It is now 2.30 am and, having learned that the schedule has accelerated, I wake Diane who comes downstairs, groggy but as excited as I am, to welcome a new member of the family. Before long there is the noise of an engine outside on this cold still night. We open the front door to ﬁnd a sleek-looking vehicle parked in the middle of the road, quite unlike the battered Transit van I had imagined. A man has emerged from it to check that they have found the right house and he quickly returns to the dog transporter to collect a bundle which he places in my arms. He steps back, gets out his phone to take a picture, and then within seconds both he and the van are gone, heading for the next drop-o twenty-ﬁve miles away in Maidenhead. Sophie has arrived at her forever home!

The photo which the driver sends us twenty minutes later is one we will scrutinise time and again over the next year. It shows me grinning broadly, despite the early hour, but the creature in my arms is looking sad and terrified. She appears much smaller than we had imagined, her ears are floppy, and she is curled up as if trying to hide from the world. We retreat inside and I put her down on the wooden floor of our hallway where she promptly does what a dog needs to do in several places. We are prepared for this: our last dog came to us at about the same age, also not toilet-trained, so we are well equipped with antiseptic wipes and poo bags. We know that at the age of one, Sophie is still an adolescent and accidents can happen. So we’re expecting another delivery later that day – a bumper pack of absorbent puppy pads to be placed at strategic spots, which should be rather more e ective than the sheets of the Financial Times we had spread out over our rugs for our beloved Cabbage fifteen years earlier.

We usher Sophie through the door into the combined living room and kitchen that serves as our main living space, little

knowing that she would not dare venture back across the threshold to other parts of the house for many months to come. We manage to persuade her to have a couple of gulps from the water bowl we have put out, then Diane retreats upstairs to try to get a few hours’ sleep.

I stay downstairs and stretch out on the red leather sofa where our last dog used to join us whenever we watched television; I shut my eyes, knowing that I will get no sleep but pretending that I might. For the next couple of hours I keep Sophie company, but she shows no inclination either to come close to me or to explore her new home. Her main aim seems to be to find as small a space as possible to retreat to: first she squeezes herself under the bottom shelf of a bookcase, then in a corner next to the sofa. Soon after 6 am, Diane decides she cannot sleep and comes downstairs to see how we are doing. We start to prepare a cooked breakfast but first we have an important task to attend to.

Both Diane and I are enthusiastic users of Twitter, using the social media service as a work tool but also, somewhat cautiously, for some of our personal interests. I was a very early adopter, joining in 2007 for the purposes of reporting on the new phenomenon of social media for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. In the early years most of my tweets were about technology news, sharing stories and connecting with other techies but soon I began tweeting about more personal things – my love of baking, particularly sourdough bread, and my daily walks with our dog Cabbage. When Cabbage was alive – before her kidnapping as a ﬁfteen-year-old dog, her eventual return and then rapidly declining health – I left home every morning before 7 am, rain or shine, for a forty-minute circuit of our local parks. I tried to keep it going after her death but somehow when I peered outside and the weather was bad, it seemed foolish to

get drenched for no reason, and I soon became a fair-weather walker.

As one of the UK ’s leading economists and now a Professor at Cambridge University, Diane had been a little sni y initially about my Twitter habit. But she eventually realised that many of her peers were using the service to discuss economics and promote their research, and it has since become an invaluable place for her to network with other academics; slowly but surely she had built a platform of 30,000 Twitter followers which, post-Sophie, has now doubled. Diane is a more serious person than I am, with a more work-focused Twitter feed, but she does tend to tweet about two subjects other than economics – dance and dogs. Dance, because she has been taking ballet classes twice a week for nearly forty years and is an obsessive Strictly Come Dancing fan, tweeting out her scores for the contestants, and getting impatient when the great British public backs a loveable klutz at the expense of a better dancer. And dogs, because she is a huge dog lover, delighting in videos and photos of amusing or soulful pets. Such was her devotion to Cabbage that her Twitter proﬁle still features a picture of our beautiful Collie cross.

So, ﬁrst things ﬁrst. Diane wants her network to know that we have a new dog, and so at 0617 hrs on that December morning she tweets the photo of me standing on our doorstep clutching Sophie along with this caption: ‘Meet Sophie, here greeting @ruskin147 when she arrived last night. She’s tired & nervous after a long journey but we’re looking forward to settling her in to her new home.’

We get on with the job of making a breakfast of scrambled eggs on my homemade bread with bacon and tomatoes, and hoping that, just as Cabbage had been, Sophie will be an enthusiastic sna er of leftovers from our plates. But since she is still

cowering in a corner, she misses out on some tasty morsels of bacon fat. No matter, the big moment I have been waiting for all this year is about to arrive – our ﬁrst walk.

Now on a bright frosty Saturday morning, I am ready to resume the old routine. We decide to take it gently and let Sophie roam our small London garden first for a short time before introducing her to the suburban streets of our area and the dogs of our neighbours. But the moment we get her outside she dives under a garden table and hides, cowering behind some flowerpots. Diane has to drag her out and we put a lead on her. By this time I have downgraded my expectations of this first walk to a few circuits of the lawn but even this proves impossible. Sophie digs in her heels, refusing to budge an inch. We give up and take her back inside where she makes her way to her spot behind the red leather sofa.

We tell ourselves this is disappointing but not really surprising. After all, the poor creature has been uprooted from the barn in rural Romania which was her home, transported across Europe in the conﬁned space of a noisy van with a dozen strange dogs for three days, and then dumped in the unfamiliar environment of a house with two weird humans who seem to want to be her friends. No wonder she is traumatised but, we reason, once she has had a few days to decompress and get used to her new home she’ll realise she has lucked out and all will be well.

I set o for the walk on my own – I have missed my regular Saturday morning exercise class, so I need to put some steps in if I am to meet the daily activity targets set by my Apple watch. When I get to the park, I post a photo on Instagram which is supposed to have a dog in it, adding this caption: ‘Solo walk this morning – new dog Sophie too tired and scared after her long journey to accompany me. We’re taking it slowly and hopefully in a while we’ll settle into a new morning routine.’

The rest of the day passes in a blur, so tired and emotionally worn out are we by the events of the early hours and the anxious wait for Sophie to arrive. I slump in front of the TV for the World Cup third place play-o , then we have dinner on trays watching the ﬁnal of Strictly Come Dancing. Sophie, meanwhile, remains in the narrow space between the red sofa and a radiator. It is quite restful really, it occurs to me – though not quite how we had expected our ﬁrst evening with the new dog to be.

Before heading upstairs to bed that night we place some puppy pads on the living room rug and by the back door into the garden. ‘Night, night, Sophie,’ we say, closing the living room door and leaving her to spend her ﬁrst night in this strange house on her own. We would have loved to take her upstairs to sleep in our bedroom as Cabbage did, but it was pretty clear that was not going to happen just yet.

After a patchy night’s sleep, I wake on Sunday soon after 5 am and lie in bed for more than an hour, listening intently for any sound from downstairs. As you may already have gathered, early waking has been a rather trying feature of my life ever since the onset of my Parkinson’s disease. Insomnia and disordered sleep patterns are common symptoms of the condition unfortunately, and something which all the friends involved in a Parkinson’s podcast we have started (more on this later) struggle with too. Su ce to say for now that, while I am excited and unsettled by the arrival of Sophie in our lives, my frequently broken nights around this time aren’t entirely down to that. The downside to waking up hours before everyone else is that you have a lot of time to ruminate about all kinds of things, which isn’t always helpful . . .

As I lie in bed on this Sunday morning, I keep wondering what I will find when I get up – will Sophie have gone on the rampage, tried to chew her way through the door to escape or knocked down the Christmas tree? Or will she have found her nice cosy bed, had a good sleep and be ready to make a fresh start with her new family? At 6.30 am I finally creep downstairs to make a cup of tea and gingerly open the door to the living room. Where I find . . . Nothing. Well, apart from one wet patch on a puppy pad which is the only evidence of Sophie having been out and about. A glance behind the sofa confirms that she is still there, looking up at me with fearful eyes.

And that’s where she remains for the whole day. This means she misses out on another activity I’d been really looking forward to having her with me for. Every Sunday morning I drive a couple of miles to Hanwell to meet my personal trainer Wendy on the towpath of the Grand Union Canal. Wendy is a small ﬁery woman who by her own admission prefers animals to people, her great love an ageing horse whose care seems to take up much of her income and a lot of her time. When I was training for half-marathons Wendy used to cycle alongside me on 10K runs up and down the canal between Brentford and Southall. These days, however, we tend to just do a few stretches, a bit of power walking, and then she puts a pair of pink boxing gloves on me and peppers me with amiable insults as I essay a few jabs and hooks.

Until the beginning of this year, Cabbage was a constant companion on these outings, racing ahead of us in the early days, towards the end of her life barely keeping up. She and Wendy, who always turned up with a bit of chicken or a sausage as a treat for her, adored each other; when she died Wendy was heartbroken, tearing up for a long time afterwards every time I mentioned Cabbage.

But in recent weeks Wendy has been excited by the news of a new dog, and eager to meet her. So when I turn up alone this Sunday morning, I can see the disappointment written all over her face. But never mind, we agree, give it a few weeks and Sophie will be bounding ahead along the towpath urging us to keep up.

Back at home, the situation has not changed. Sophie is still in the only place where she feels safe. Diane does tempt her out briefly by putting a leftover fish finger on a plate at the entrance to her den. Sophie grabs it and retreats with it to her dark, warm spot between the sofa and the radiator. That evening, neighbours we have known for twenty-five years come over for the regular get-together we have at each other’s houses every Sunday. They are of course eager to meet our new dog but we have to disappoint them, explaining that she is too shy at this stage and trying our best to dissuade them from leaning over the back of the sofa to say hello.

We had known, even before Sophie arrived, that Monday was going to be a potentially tricky day for our bonding process with the new member of the household. The week always starts with a 5.15 am alarm call and Diane departs for Cambridge and her job as Professor of Public Policy, returning on Wednesday evening. But on that particular Monday I have one of my regular appointments at Moorﬁelds Eye Hospital, an hour’s tube journey away in East London. In 2005, after the discovery of a malignant melanoma behind my left eye, I had undergone an operation which had seen a radioactive plaque inserted behind the eye. Ever since, they have kept a close eye on my tumour, occasionally blasting it with a laser if it shows signs of growing

again, and in 2019 sending me for proton beam therapy at a specialist centre on Merseyside. That has been very successful and the tumour now appears dormant – but a side-e ect of what I had described in a BBC video as ‘having a small hadron collider ﬁred into your eye’ is the threat of painful glaucoma. My doctors have decided that to try to avert this I should undergo a course of laser treatment accompanied by injections into the eye as the best option, and that Monday was to see my ﬁrst session in the laser room.

The terror I had experienced back when I was diagnosed with cancer has faded, to be replaced by a weary resignation at yet more uncomfortable, if not painful, treatment. But the week before, the question had loomed – who was going to look after the new dog? She would, we assumed, be tearing around the house chewing up anything left on the ﬂoor or maybe barking pitifully at being deserted by her new family. So we have asked our second child, who lives just a couple of tube stops away, to pop over that morning to do a bit of dog-sitting. In the event, this will prove to be a far from arduous task – our new dog remains behind the sofa the whole time and does not emerge either when I return from the hospital at lunchtime after an uncomfortable session staring into the laser machine.

Later that afternoon, as I sit alone in the kitchen feeling a bit sorry for myself, Sophie does briefly wander out and put her nose in her food bowl. I quickly grab a picture on my phone. By now, on the third day of her life as a Londoner, our new dog is becoming something of a social media celebrity. Diane’s Twitter post showing her in my arms on our doorstep has attracted a record number of ‘likes’ and my first tweet about Sophie with a picture of her brief visit to the garden and refusal to come for a walk gets an even bigger reaction. Since then my phone’s screen has been continually alight with notifications, all

about Sophie and how cute she is. It seems that the faithful band of online supporters who followed us through the last years of our beloved Cabbage are now gripped by the drama of our very nervous Romanian rescue dog, and thousands more have joined their number.

Knowing how a hashtag can be a way of forming a community around a subject and help it to go viral, I sit and think about what might work for Sophie. Then I add a caption to my photo of her at her food bowl: ‘Immensely cheered after a rather trying morning at the hospital to be able to lure #sophiefromromania out from behind the sofa brieﬂy for a snack.’ I post it on Instagram which means it is automatically reposted on Twitter via an automation app called If This Then That. Soon, it has accumulated 700 likes on Instagram – about ten times as many as I’d normally get for a post – and more than 7,000 on Twitter.

Comments on Instagram tend as a rule to be longer and more insightful than on Twitter. And now, yes, there are lots of responses saying how beautiful Sophie is, but there are also plenty from experienced rescue dog owners o ering advice. A number of these are recommending that we get a harness as well as a lead on our fearful dog as soon as possible – because otherwise there is a danger she will bolt when we walk her. Others o er words of reassurance: ‘Everything must be so frightening to her,’ says one. ‘Just be near and with her. She’ll get it soon and will be your best dog.’

Over the next few days I continue to use the #sophiefromromania hashtag and the audience continues to grow. In that week before Christmas the weather is damp and gloomy, and the news, whether it is the cost-of-living crisis or the war in Ukraine,

appears universally grim. People seem desperate to be distracted by some good news and for a while it feels as though Sophie might deliver that both for us and for her growing army of fans. Eager to know what she gets up to overnight once we have gone up to bed, not long after her arrival I set up what I call my ‘nature-cam’ in our kitchen cum living space. I had originally used this cheap motion-triggered infrared camera to get shots of foxes which would cavort in our garden and attack the food waste bins. Now, by placing it near the fridge looking back towards the red sofa, I can be sure to get a view of most of the space she occupies when she emerges. She is confined – or rather has confined herself – to the knocked-through living room, dining area and kitchen we created not long after we moved in, in 1992. Beyond the door to the rest of the house lie the hall and the front room, which is home to the piano, and is mainly used when we have guests at the weekend. But to Sophie so far, this and the bedrooms and study on the first floor – let alone the loft conversion – all remain alien territory.

The next day when I come down in the morning Sophie remains behind the sofa but when I extract the memory card from the nature-cam and put it in my computer, I discover that she has not been there all night. Instead, the black-and-white video clips show her striding conﬁdently around the kitchen, even stopping to have a sni at the camera as if to say, ‘Who’s spying on me?’ When I chop together a few of these clips and post them on social media, this – the ﬁrst footage of Sophie – is viewed nearly 300,000 times.

People continue to leave lots of messages of support or advice on how to treat her.

‘This is a gripping story. She is so lovely. Good luck. Watching her progress and wishing you all well,’ and, ‘She walks around with tail up, so feeling conﬁdent in the space,’ are among

more than 170 comments on the video. Wow – I usually try to respond to comments but with as many as this, it would take all day!

Over the next day, Sophie continues to hide away for most of the time but then on the Tuesday evening, the fourth day after her arrival, she pops out briefly while we are sitting watching television. Then as she tries to squeeze past the Christmas tree she knocks an ornament o , panics and dives back behind the sofa. The following day, as if she is recovering from some traumatic incident, Sophie is once more a recluse and we barely see her. This is something of a disappointment to another regular caller to our home – our cleaner, Halina, who’s from Poland. Halina first came to us twenty-five years ago barely speaking any English; now she is a successful businesswoman with buyto-let properties as well as her cleaning enterprise and able to negotiate any situation she needs to with ease. Over the years, she has helped us with childcare, and has been to a family wedding and a funeral, so she feels like part of the family by now. She adored Cabbage and has been eagerly anticipating the arrival of our new dog since she heard the news. She desperately wants to stroke and pet Sophie as she did Cabbage.

So that day and for a long time to come, Halina has to manage her own disappointment about a situation she admits she doesn’t completely understand. And the fact that each time she visits she brings with her a very noisy vacuum cleaner, which will be used in every room in the house, means that an appearance by the recluse behind the sofa is even less likely than when other visitors appear. Sophie is truly terriﬁed of the sound of the vacuum cleaner, and will remain so for many months, and naturally enough, she comes to associate Halina’s visits with the appearance of this vociferous monster.

Thursday, the day before Christmas Eve, also starts quietly

on the Sophie front, although the nature-cam shows she has been out a number of times during the night. But then that evening as we watch the news, she is out and roaming freely around the kitchen for long enough for me to grab some footage. I post it on Twitter and Instagram and the internet goes bonkers. On Instagram the commenters can barely contain their delight: ‘Look at her getting a bit braver’; ‘Well done, Sophie!’ ; ‘She is getting there’ ; ‘This is such positive progress.’ On Twitter nearly half a million people watch the video, with almost 300 making comments. I seize on this one and the encouragement it o ers: ‘This is the heartwarming tale Christmas needs. Look at her, she’ll be sco ng turkey at the table with you all come Sunday.’ Later that night, #sophiefromromania trends on Twitter for the ﬁrst time. It is exhilarating to see so many people excited and involved in this story and we bathe in a warm glow of online love.

Christmas has arrived, a time we love to celebrate in our own home with friends and family. On Christmas Eve, a Saturday and a week to the day since Sophie’s arrival, I bake sausage rolls as I always do while listening to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College Cambridge, in preparation for the arrival of a dozen or so neighbours as well as our son’s family for early evening drinks. But what to do about Sophie? She is still really scared of me and Diane most of the time: how will she react to a crowd of strangers clumping noisily around the space she has spent a week in and is perhaps beginning to regard as home, or at the very least, a safe space for the time being?

It turns out to be pretty simple – the moment the doorbell rings and the ﬁrst guests troop in, she retreats behind her sofa. Among the early arrivals are our son, his wife and their two children, a girl, who’s nearly four, and a two-month-old baby boy. Our granddaughter has been hugely excited about meeting

the new dog but has to be dissuaded from peering behind the sofa, and that applies to the adult guests too. Sophie remains in her safe space throughout the party, and she is still there when we go to bed.

Christmas Day dawns and I creep downstairs to ﬁnd no physical signs of overnight activity, though the nature-cam does show that Sophie has ventured out in the small hours. Our Christmas Day festivities are more low-key than normal, as our son and his children will be celebrating with his wife’s parents. There are just ﬁve of us gathered round the table as I carve the turkey, and I look hopefully towards the sofa: surely the delicious smells will tempt Sophie out? Not a chance – she stays where she is and remains there for the rest of the day.

Over the next couple of days, I feel a stab of worry as we see very little of the dog we had hoped would be at the centre of our Christmas celebrations. Every now and then she is tempted out by a piece of turkey skin or some bacon, but she is mostly ‘Sophie-behind-the-Sofa’. The day after Boxing Day I come downstairs in the morning to ﬁnd, for the second night running, no sign that she’s been out. After another day when we don’t seem to be getting anywhere, I’m feeling a little gloomy and in the evening I retreat to the loft to watch a football match, hoping to take my mind o the subject which now feels like it’s dominating our lives.

Downstairs Diane, no football fan, is watching Countryﬁle in the living room. Suddenly my phone pings and there’s a photo of Sophie standing in front of the television, then another of her peering out from behind another sofa. I come downstairs and cautiously sit down next to Diane, while Sophie continues to stroll around, sni ng at the scented candle and the rug, exploring her territory. I sneak o to grab a piece of sausage from the fridge, then sit back down and wait with it in my outstretched

hand. The dog looks at me, carefully approaches, and then everso-delicately removes the sausage from my hand.

This feels like a tremendous breakthrough, and when I post a short video on social media of her taking a second piece of sausage, the internet goes completely mad. A million people watch the footage on Twitter and there are nearly 1,400 comments. ‘The perfect Christmas story, Rory. Well done!’ writes @paulwaugh. ‘Our whole family is following her progress,’ tweets @micky_kilburn. ‘My daughter just shouted “Mum, the Twitter dog has come out from behind the sofa.” Well done, #sophiefromromania, your new chapter begins.’

Even before the sausage-eating incident, mainstream media outlets have begun to notice this emerging social media phenomenon. The Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail all get in touch, as do a number of broadcasters. On the Thursday morning after Christmas Day I appear live from the kitchen on BBC Radio 5 Live and BBC Breakfast talking about Sophie. Earlier when I came downstairs ﬁrst thing to make tea, I found the Christmas tree toppled sideways onto a bookcase, so I imagine there has been a middle-of-the-night shock for the roaming resident of behind-the-sofa.

Sitting in front of my laptop with the corner of the sofa in the background I hear the presenter of BBC Breakfast introduce the item: ‘You might have had lots of visitors over the festive period, some of them more trouble than others, but not many will have been as shy and retiring as the guest who arrived in the home of our former BBC colleague Rory Cellan-Jones a week before Christmas.’ They use some of the video I have shot of Sophie, including the breakthrough moment of her eating out of my hand the previous night. I tell the story of the last ten days and then a dog behaviour expert in the BBC studio up in Salford has some advice for dealing with dogs like Sophie: ‘Don’t feel