After Rory Cellan-Jones’s beloved collie Cabbage died in January 2022, it took almost a year before he and his wife Diane Coyle felt ready to open their hearts to a new pet.

But once the time was right, they set about adopting a Romanian rescue puppy, a German shepherd who was delivered to their house shortly before Christmas 2022.

They named her Sophie.

Rory, the BBC‘s former technology correspondent, diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2019, was eagerly looking forward to bonding with their new pet and enjoying daily walks with her to help maintain his physical and mental health.

But Sophie immediately made it clear she wasn’t keen on going anywhere. In fact, she proved to be so fearful she barely ventured out from behind the sofa for seven months. (It would be 14 months before Rory could take her for a walk).

“When people first said it could be months before she settles down, I thought, ‘Oh God, I can’t take months’,” says Rory. So he and Diane, a professor of economics, embarked upon the long, determined and painstakingly slow journey of helping Sophie settle into her new home.

Rory admits, however, that by spring 2023 he wondered if anything was going to change. “I just thought, ‘How long can we go on like this? I couldn’t believe a dog would not want to go out for a walk.

“There were times when I thought, ‘Oh for God’s sake, pull yourself together’. But I never really came that close to giving up because we had so much support.”

Much of that came via Twitter, where hundreds of thousands of people followed Rory’s updates about “Sophie from Romania”.

“It was extraordinary,” he says. “And it was hugely supportive. I don’t know whether we would have coped doing this in isolation.”

The lynchpin, however, was Si Wooler, a dog trainer based in Scotland, who contacted Rory via Twitter and proceeded to share a steady flow of invaluable advice to help both Rory and Sophie to cope with their predicament.

“Si was on the WhatsApp most days,” says Rory. “We needed somebody telling us it’ll be all right otherwise we’d have been alone and we might well have given her back. Who knows?”

What has baffled Rory and Diane is that there is no obvious explanation for Sophie’s fears.

“She was part of a litter of puppies dumped by the roadside – but they were rescued and looked after in a barn. It wasn’t particularly traumatic. Si thinks she just wasn’t socialised.”

Small milestones became cause for celebration, such as the day in January when Sophie allowed Diane to stroke her.

There was a bigger breakthrough in summer 2023 when Sophie went on medication after her vet prescribed anti-anxiety drug fluoxetine and antidepressant trazodone. “For seven months, she never went beyond the door to the kitchen and living room space. That was an invisible barrier to her.

“And then in July, six weeks to the day after Sophie started taking ‘Prozac’, Diane was standing at the front door, taking some rubbish out.

She turned around and had this huge shock because there was Sophie.”

Thanks to the medication, Rory and Diane were able to embark upon an intensive training regime using a 16-stage technique to encourage Sophie to accept her harness.

However, Rory suffered a major setback last October after he fractured his elbow in a nasty fall on a dark, wet street.

“Parkinson’s is a progressive condition,” he says.

“For the first three or four years after I was diagnosed in 2019, I didn’t feel I was being affected too badly.

“I was already getting a bit worse when I had the fall and that knocked a lot of confidence out of me. For one thing, I can’t stretch my arm out completely any more and that is also my weak side, my Parkinson’s side.”

But by February this year he felt strong enough to attempt decisive action with Sophie. Diane carried her into the back of their car and they drove to the local park.

“That was the key breakthrough,” he says.

“We were a bit decisive, having waited endlessly, and just stuck her in the car on a very cold Sunday morning. She sniffed around and got curious and we were off. And that was just exhilarating.”

Fittingly, Sophie and Rory are now set to front Parkinson’s UK’s latest fundraising campaign Walkies.

By this spring, Sophie was enjoying a walk to the local park twice a day, until her old fears started to resurface. “Gradually she started resisting, first at the gates of the park and then further and further back, and then she retreated to a couple of streets around us,” says Rory.

“We still go out for a walk every day but she’s got more and more resistant about going very far.

“She plants her paws and says, ‘I’m not going any further’. Something must have spooked her but it’s very difficult to identify what.”

Rory describes the experience of adopting Sophie as an emotional rollercoaster. One day, she is excited, thinking she has made a friend when she spots her reflection in a glass table; the next, she is scared by the large cardboard cut-out of herself – sent to Rory by his publishers.

These days Sophie is, at least, relaxed at home. “The good thing is she’s really affectionate with us. She likes a belly rub.” Like a proud parent, Rory holds up his phone to show a photo of Sophie leaping up to him. “Those moments are just joyful,” he says, beaming.

Still, there is no shortage of hurdles to overcome. It remains difficult to invite guests round, as Sophie barks relentlessly at them.

“Sometimes she’ll come and start sniffing at people and be all right as long as they don’t move.”

When the grandchildren visit, Sophie is kept in a separate room. Rory also longs to travel abroad with her.

Does he have any regrets? He thinks perhaps they should have been more experimental, introducing Sophie to more dogs earlier on.

And he admits he’s now quite cautious about the idea of importing dogs from abroad.

“I would say try to meet the dog before you adopt it.”

Still, despite her limitations, Rory’s love for Sophie shines through.

“You’ve got to accept that your idea of a dog, your ideal of a dog, may never be fulfilled. But it’s a journey. And we’ve come a long way.”