Last updated 11:34, Friday, 23 May 2008

Had it been possible to text a dog for a walk, I might have considered keeping a pet.If she did, she didn’t let on. In fact her expression conveyed she considered my excitement over pheasants a touch overdone – and embarrassing.

It seems you can do most things by text now.

But not dog-walking – at least not yet.

My friend’s boyfriend dumped her via text message.

“Sorry luv its over. In talks wi X wife. J.” He never even collected his cat.

He was a southerner and quite a bit younger than her, so we weren’t surprised.

Young southerners are very much into personal technology... iPods, Blackberries, raspberries and the like.

Unlike my northern friend, who had been sitting by her land-line since she met him.

She didn’t text back. She said it would have taken her too long to get it right and she’d have missed Coronation Street.

So that was that. She wears slippers in the evenings now, eats quality ice cream and doesn’t need to shave her legs anything like so often as she used to. She’s much happier and we’re all very pleased for her.

She still has his low maintenance cat. I don’t even have one of those. Until it’s possible to fax a cat into its litter, I doubt I ever will.

Watching next door’s cat in my borders and stroking another neighbour’s dog as I pass to buy cigarettes at the Spar is about my limit. Communion with the animal kingdom is strictly on an arm’s-length basis.

“Oh, you have a pheasant!”

“No I don’t!”

In the garden on the first warm, sunny weekend day since last April, we were communing with iced gin and tonics.

“Yes you do. Can you not hear it?”

I’d heard something but reckoned someone must have been texting again, into my handbag.

In fact I’d often heard the same sound – like a man with no teeth and not much puff blowing a trumpet – but I’d dismissed it as the boiler being overdue for service, someone else’s faulty lawnmower, a crow with a cough.

“It’s a pheasant. Have you never seen it?”

She knows a thing or two about wildlife and country living, this woman.

There’s more to her than gold sandals and Chanel sunglasses. A mine of information, she is. A veritable expert on all things feathered, furry and tunnelling under her lawn.

She even knows how much it costs to catch a lawnsworth of moles (five) – precisely half a pair of shoes. That’s real rural know-how.

Come to think of it, once or twice I have seen a big bird, two of them actually, in the garden.

Attractive in their own way, they looked similar to the kind that might recently have fallen off a whisky bottle and appeared sort of – well, married.

But linking the gummy-trumpet-text-croaks with my handsome visitors had obviously been beyond me. And no wonder.

As a Yorkshire townie, the closest I’d come to a pheasant had been in Sainsbury’s, where it had been plucked and filleted, its plump breast vacuum-packed in plastic and chilled. In hindsight, not at all environmentally friendly. Certainly not for the poor bird.

Now it would seem I have a married pair as arm’s-length pets, which is simply perfect. I suspect they do time-share living, choosing between my garden and the field where the cows live, just beyond my hedge, as the fancy takes them.

And assuming that’s OK with the cows, then it suits me fine.

“Funny thing is,” I said to the golden-footed one, “when you spot moles in your garden you have them caught, when I find spiders I throw them out, we both shout shoo at crows and chase wasps with Raid.

“But cows and pheasants appear to share space quite happily. Don’t you find that funny?”

But not for a mill-town lass from Dewsbury, it wasn’t. There are folk there who’d sell their kids to live where pheasants potter about sounding like geriatric jazz legends.

And I’ve got them – or rather, they’ve got me.

Low maintenance to the point of no maintenance, they don’t ask for walking, stroking, feeding or cuddling. They’re friendly and pretty and proud and I think I’m in love.

I suspect there’ll be a wave of unbridled envy rushing through my network of Yorkshire townie friends when I text to tell them I have pheasants.

Which shouldn’t matter at all but it does... opportunities to boast surface only rarely.

“New adventure every day in Cumbria. Have pheasants in garden. V happy. Ax”

Trust she of the Chanel shades to go one better. The girl can’t help it.

“I really must get round to seeing about some peacocks for my garden,” she said, clinking the ice in her glass. “What do you think?”

“Don’t know yet... I’ll text you.”