Igor

I have a confession: I'm a little obsessed with truffles. Not in a fancy restaurant way, more in a "give me an early morning forest, mist still hanging between the trees, and a clever dog leading the way" kind of way. There's something almost magical about the whole ritual: the quiet, the damp earth, the patience of following a nose far better than your own, not knowing what you'll find until you find it. And then, as the light fades, turning that small, hidden treasure into something warm and delicious, shared at the end of a slow, unhurried day.

Igor started somewhere else entirely, though. It began on an ordinary bike ride to nursery. We passed a dog, tall, spotted, impossible to miss. My daughter lit up straight away: "Look, what a beautiful dog with the dots!" I told her about my father's dog, a Great Dane, also called Igor. She loved the name immediately, and from that one moment, we started making up a story together, about a character who was big, calm, and never needed to prove anything to anyone.

The character changed shape along the way, as characters often do when you build them slowly instead of all at once. The Great Dane became a poodle: a crown, a bow tie, an expression somewhere between regal and completely unbothered. He kept the name, though. Igor still fit, maybe even better than before.

Then the truffles crept back in. I found out something I hadn't known before: poodles were once the truffle hunters of choice in France, long before the little Lagotto dogs took over the job. Calm, precise, unbothered by the noise around them, exactly Igor's kind of energy. In my head, he's somewhere in the Dordogne right now, nose to the ground, taking his time. Not rushing. Not performing for anyone. Just quietly, patiently, doing the one thing he's good at: noticing what others walk straight past.

That's the Igor I wanted for House of Vida. Not clumsy, not loud, not the kind of character who trips over his own feet for a laugh. Gentle. Attentive. Endlessly kind, to people and animals alike, without ever asking who deserves it more. He doesn't rank the people he meets. He doesn't perform for approval. He just shows up, warm and unbothered, and lets everyone else set their own pace around him.

He's still a work in progress, in a way. My daughter and I keep adding to his story, a little at a time, the same way you'd slowly train a good dog: with patience, with consistency, without rushing it. Maybe that's fitting for a character who's meant to represent exactly that.