Ugly, messy and obstinate – the dog I’ll never let go

Perversely, I enjoy her demonstrative passion and have learned to parry, catch or sidestep her Exocet approaches, giggling helplessly. When not flying through the air, she stands erect on her hind legs and, like a toddling child, clings to my thigh with what I now see as her arms, her forepaws as near as dammit used as hands.

Heavier now, her shoulders broad, her hips still slim, she is a mass of hard uncuddly muscle, her leaping prodigious (once over seven feet of garden wall), her running so immediately accelerative that I'd swear she reaches 20mph in half a second. Throw a ball and she explodes into the chase, but, boss-eyed as she is, she has difficulty following its path and bounce, for the skewed right eye is the one she uses on the run and thus is blind to any ball that bounces to her left. She then quarters the ground and plunges into undergrowth until, with nose rather than eye, she finds it — pure doggy intelligence. All this is fine on the common, but the garden has been littered with smashed pots, 20 kilos of terracotta, earth and shrub always the loser when shouldered aside by 20 kilos of unseeing muscle-dog.

Lottie's idea of swimming is to paddle furiously with her forepaws while keeping her hind paws on the bottom of the pond until almost vertical, and then panic. A passer-by observed that she has wonderful teeth for grinding table legs; she may have grown beyond that stage, but in idle moments she enjoys breaking twigs off shrubs and has pruned several to uncomely stumps. Frustrated by any delay in leaving for a walk she will drag the hall carpets into the garden, and within the house wrecking my bed and tumbling the standard lamps are pastimes on which Winck, the old alsatian, casts a jaundiced eye, and from which Jack the whippet flees. She no longer steals their food, nor mine, though she has an opportunist approach to anything held in the hand too long— a whole peach, for example, swallowed in a gulp, compelling me to inspect her turds until my anxiety wore away (I never did find the stone).

She hates strange men and even to men she knows, she never warms, but lurks with baleful bloodshot eyes — I suspect that men mistreated her before they dumped her and that she will not forget. With me, however, she is as warm and playful as a puppy, and as trusting as she should be. "Take her back to the dogs' home," say friends, thinking her unsuitably loutish and laddish. "Never," say I. Never.