I should know better

A traditional endpoint to Christmas and New Year festivities, at which you take down the tree and face the year head on.

Well Christmas and New Year were quiet, punctuated by a horrible virus - I went to visit my realtives on Boxing Day and was invalided home just in time - 8 hours in your own loo is bad enough, but 8 hours in someone else`s........

It`s a hard time for puppy dogs. Storm and Shadow (whose sojourn under the walnut tree paid off at last) are still looking for homes.

The younger Merlin is facing the hardships of growing up as a puppy dog. Quite aside from looking like a tiny walking haystack, he has social problems.

Puppy bitches are usually cute and forward in the doggy social stakes - they rapidly find their place among the girls, and the boys are all in favour of them anyway, But puppy dogs are pond life. The adult bitches see them as a total nuisance, always underfoot, and the males write them off as "surplus to requirements." and give me looks that say "Why did you keep THAT?" At the moment only his mother loves Merlin - and sometimes aunty Solitaire when she feels like playing. He is feeling his way carefully in canine society, and prefers to stay indoors, laze about and pester me, or just to sit and think about the meaning of life and where his pink toy has got to.

Even his devoted mother undermines him - whenever he heads for my knee she intercepts him and gives him a quick wash with an apologetic look - "He really wasn`t clean enough to come up".

Well, he has to grow up. The showring beckons. And despite the unpromising start to the show season (so glad I didn`t go to that one ! ), his debut looms and no doubt I will take him.

That`ll give him something else to worry about.