Puppy Love

Puppy love has made me barking mad

The new puppy - Lucky - is a maniac. It might look nice - like a fat brown sheep - but it's the devil incarnate. It's only been with me for two nights but so far its catalogue of misdemeanours outweighs Argos's.

It has massacred the Berber carpet I dragged all the way across Morocco and back through LAX at five o'clock in the morning. It has torn to shreds a rather special pair of Arts and Crafts dining chairs. It won't eat its breakfast and it far prefers Dockers shoes to the pair made from tripe I bought for it at no mean expense from a pet shop in Russian Hill.

It sleeps on my head from where it barks out of the window - all night - at imaginary birds. It found the packet of doggy chocs - an important part, apparently, of its reward-based training programme - and ate them all, before looking me straight in the eye while it peed on the carpet.

Out of the house the puppy is the bitter end.

The young dog lapped heartily at the baby’s open mouth – it was all too utterly sick-making

In DODGER DREAM FIELD it felled a three-year-old, and then leapt on an immaculate woman in a blue tracksuit. To say it worries the wildlife would be a gross understatement.

A friend came round yesterday with his six-month-old baby. We snatched a moment to eat asparagus carbonara while the puppy slept and the baby reclined in the sitting room. Alerted by gurgles of delight, we went in to discover the puppy astride the baby lapping heartily at its open mouth. To say they were both enjoying it would hardly do justice to what we saw. The whole scene was too utterly sick-making. We agreed that this would probably be best kept from her husband. I can't think for barking. I am at my wits' end.