"Whenever I meet him he seems to have invented a new way of being really annoying"

IT’S 6.30pm, and I am sitting at the table in my friend’s kitchen, trying to ignore Doc, her newish rescue dog, the size of a wart-hog, who’s eyeballing me from across the room.

Doc is hard to ignore; whenever I meet him, he seems to have invented, especially for me, a new way of being really annoying. And when he’s done showing me his new way of being really annoying, my friend simply cannot get over the charm of it, and all but claps her hands in delight.

“Aaah, Doc likes you,” she said last time, when he kept dropping a manky wet tennis ball in my lap. And after he’d kept his Manky Tennis Ball japes going for half an hour, and my coffee had gone cold in its cup, she cooed, “aaah look at Doc,” in that love-me-love-my-dog voice which makes you feel like Myra Hindley just for not wanting to play with a manky wet tennis ball. “You just want to play, don’t you Docolate Chocolate.”