It this one true, great question of our time?

What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? Are we alone in the universe? Were William Shakespeare's plays in fact written by feminist woman Emilia Bassano, thus explaining at last why the plays have no heroes but only heroines?

Yes, these are questions of some intrinsic importance but (save for the towering issue of Shakespeare authorship, resolved for me now by my certainty that Emilia Bassano was this "Shakespeare") they pale into pallid insignificance next to the Great Question of Our Time of whether or not our dogs love us.

A manic dog lover, I pricked up my ears and even did a little intellectual drooling as I read this eternal question intelligently discussed in a new essay. Authors Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry joust with one another on this big, shaggy, four-legged subject.

And when I call it the great question of our time, I am not being entirely frivolous because dog ownership, already a huge phenomenon (of pet-owning Australians, which is 72 per cent of us, 48 per cent of us have a dog) has taken on extra significances during the pandemic. The parts dogs can play in adding luster to our mental health, especially by combating the pandemic's enforced lonelinesses, are being much-researched now. You can read a fact-rich summary of all this in a World Economic Forum piece This Is How Pets Helped Our Mental Health During Lockdown.

In So Do Our Dogs Love Us? Hannah Fry argues, persuasively, that yes of course they do while Adam Rutherford argues, persuasively, that, probably, no they don't.

He argues that "Because love... is necessarily a human concept and can only be expressed by humans, the answer has to be no, my beloved dog Jesse does not love me. Only humans are capable of love because it is a human condition. The feeling that Jesse has for me is a dog feeling, and therefore ineffable to me. Until he learns to speak, he can't describe to me how he feels."

But your dog-besotted columnist is moved to think that almost all feelings of love (whatever "love" is), including our species' yearning for it from all and any sources human and animal (I share this yearning and desperately want to believe my dog loves me while wondering why I care what a drooling brute thinks of me) are "ineffable" and mysterious. Are our love relationships with other humans any less ineffable than our love relationships with our dogs?

I'm 76 and yet even after such a good, long look at love from both sides now, from up and down and give and take and win and lose, still somehow it's love's illusions I recall and find I really don't know love at all.