MY FIRST DOGGIE LOVE WAS A COLLEGE ROMANCE

Growing up, I always had dogs but the first that was truly my own was a Labrador called Gretel. I got her a week before my 21st birthday, picking her from a litter of ten because, although the owner said she was ‘a little monster’, she seemed the most vivacious. She turned out to be very responsive and we quickly bonded. For the next ten years she was my constant companion.

I trained her to retrieve, though, in reality, it was what she wanted to do more than anything else in the world and all I had to do was channel her enthusiasm. We developed an almost telepathic relationship and I rarely had to say anything to get her to fetch. A look or a nod would be enough.

Although I suspect there was a rule somewhere forbidding it, I had Gretel with me all the time I was at university in Cambridge, and no one seemed to mind. I’d never leave her for more than a couple of hours and she went wherever I went. If she was unwelcome, I’d absent myself. I only went to half a dozen lectures in three years, preferring to take books from the library and read in my rooms with Gretel at my feet. She came to parties with me and often led a tipsy me back home.

When I walked around Cambridge she’d go with me, without having to be told to heel. If I went into a shop she waited outside and was always there when I came out, sometimes half an hour later. This is unthinkable now, but 40 years ago it was perfectly possible, if a little unusual.

While she was a paragon of obedience and the best possible companion, Gretel was incorrigibly greedy. In pubs, she’d find someone eating crisps and sit staring at them with a longing gaze. Then she’d wriggle her way round the room following the crackle of crisp packets.

She was also a thief. She once snaffled an entire Christmas cake, including its Father Christmas, snowman and other accessories. A week later I found a large pile of dog poo on the lawn with a robin on a spring balanced on top.

Monty and Gretel in the Outer Hebrides in 1983