Irreverent eye

Cherry Denman says her sketches came about from doodles of her observations during her current sojourn in China. [Photo by Wang Zhuangfei/China Daily]

The wife of a veteran British diplomat combines antic sketches of dogs with sayings from Confucius and Lao Tzu in her latest book. Mike Peters reports.

Her husband is a longtime British diplomat in Her Majesty's Foreign Service. She's in her mid-50s with a passport that sings of embassy postings, starting with China in the early 1980s. If the picture in your mind is a stodgy matron with a stiff upper lip, you haven't met Cherry Denman.

An illustrator with a quick wit and quicker laugh, she delights in drawing a quick moustache on a sketch of her queen, and she's fascinated by the sudden rush of middle-class Chinese to pamper pets, particularly dogs.

That phenomenon inspired her latest book, Way of Dog: A Canine Guide to Ancient Chinese Wisdom, in which she pairs antic sketches of pooches with sayings from the likes of Confucius and Lao Tzu.

"Suddenly, dogs are everywhere," she writes in the introduction.

"Dressed in designer couture, carried around in bicycle baskets and monogrammed handbags, they rule the stylish roost that is the new China. They are an essential accessory to an increasingly status-conscious world."

She says her sketches came about from doodles of her observations during her current sojourn in China, a three-year stint she and husband Charlie are about halfway through. Dogs are just one difference she sees a quarter-century after her first visit, this time without her two children under her wing.