I should know better

At last! The ear is up! Poor Boris had been stuffed with all kinds of additives and vitamins, but I suspect the ear`s time had smiply come. One morning when he got up, so did the ear, and it stayed up. He got the impression that he had done something important, but had no idea what. I worked hard on that ear, but I wonder if the excitement of the girls all coming in season at once had something to do with it - it certainly reduces the older males to mindless idiots.

And so Boris was at last able to go to his first show - a very big one, as it happens, and aquitted himself nobly, completely unfazed by the crowds and more dogs than he had known existed. He was placed well in a large class and enjoyed himself.

It was such a relief to deal with a happy, straightforward uncomplicated little dog like Boris, I thought, getting out Merlin. He did well, but was at his dippy best, screeching at anything black, trying to defend me from an innocent soul who bent over my chair to ask a question about the class in progress and then licking me anxiously to see if the Bad Man had hurt me. He always gives me the impression that he has learned how to be an adult male Papillon from one of those skimpy manuals badly translated from the Japanese - the kind that you always get with complicated electronic equipment.

Faced with a big event like this huge show he goes into excited incompetent overdrive, gazing at it all blankly, like a man who has rashly promised to create a fitted bedroom from a huge pile of Ikea flatpacks and one small sheet of instructions......

And if you`re Merlin, you are always several screws short of the finished wardrobes.