Speaker’s corner

JENNIFER Crwys-Williams, formerly of Radio 702, came out with a book R.I.P Fifi - 51½ Uses For a Mostly Dead Maltese Poodle (published by Spearhead). I had to advise, as a friend and former colleague (but I was too late) to be careful. In my urban stockade there are swarms of Maltese; they scuttle about like handknitted woodlice, and their owners brook no nonsense. They can be just as snappy as their dogs.

I had a Maltese poodle myself but only because, years ago, I was forced to look after it by relatives bigger and stronger than me.

I concur with Jenny – Maltese are not terribly useful dogs and I admire her for finding 51.5 uses for them.

But I was able to reveal (as we old journos like to say) that Maltese owners were prepared to hit back. They formed a protest action group called the Maltese Owners Brigade (MOB).

I think this is why one hears so little of Jenny Crwys-Wlliams lately.

To be fair (and this is Speaker’s Corner’s motto) I am sure there must be at least some uses for Maltese – apart from yapping. Maybe plumbers could use them for pulling through blocked drainpipes; a pair of them, after death, could make a pair of warm bedroom slippers.

Every other breed seems to have a use. Rottweilers are working dogs, for example. Having said that, I had a Rotty once and, as I recall, it never did a day’s work in its life. He was so dumb that if you put your ear next to his head you could hear the ocean.

Retrievers are hunting dogs. Bouviers de Flandres are used as army dogs, at least in Belgium. This might explain why Belgium collapsed on day one of World War II. But Maltese? Some time back, jittery about burglaries, people were taking small dogs to the SPCA in the hope of swopping them for something bigger and toothier.

I tried it myself. We had an old Maltese called White Fang (it had also been foisted upon me). It was a noisome, bad-tempered dog and it looked the same at both ends. Visitors used to mistake it for something to wipe their feet on and I caught the gardener polishing the car with it. (“Don’t let the missus catch you,” I said.)

I took it to the SPCA and said to the young lady there, “I’ll swop White Fang here for that black Alsation over there, the one with the teeth.”

“How can you be so heartless?” she said cradling White Fang and trying to tickle it under its chin.

I said: “That’s not its chin you are tickling; its chin is at the other end, under its mouth. And you’ll find its mouth has just as many teeth as the end you are tickling.”

Slightly flustered, she parted the hair at the other end to reveal two eyes crossed in ecstasy.

She persuaded me to take the Maltese home which is why I eventually bought the Rottweiler – as a back-up.

Rottweilers normally save you having to buy a bazooka but this Rotty was terrified of everything including White Fang. But at least I could tell which end to shove the Doggy Chunks in.

Owners claim Maltese have high IQs. I rate their IQ somewhere between that of a cos lettuce and a turnip.

But they do think. All dogs think. I often wonder what are they thinking and if their brains are evolving? Will working dogs one day stage strikes? Will dogs go into politics? Knowing how white-owned dogs bark only at black people, and black-owned dogs bark only at white people, it would hardly raise the level of parliamentary debate above today’s. Shush! What’s that noise? Oh, NO! WHO LET THE DOGS OUT? Yap. Yap.