We love our dogs to bits as you’ll know if you’re a regular around these pages. I can’t begin to make any sense of it – superlatives won’t do.

They generally get what we think is a healthy diet of tinned dog food (cheap but we’re told by Claz that it’s considered “good stuff” in doggy nutrition terms), mixer and a small number of treats such as biscuits or dog chocs. Once in a blue moon, usually because the dogs have got teeth that are a bit scaled up, we give them a real bone.

Bought from the pet shop, they’re knuckle bones of cows (we think) which have been cut up and deep fried, complete with bits of flesh and marrow. Yuck. Ever since I got my first dog, my beloved Toby, I have been veggie and so very squeamish about these things. I’d never bought one for him but my Mum turned up at the house with one and when I saw his reaction, I knew it’d be wrong to deny him one again.

He took it, danced round it for three days, carted it around everywhere he went, including out on his walks and into his bed, then set about the business of eating it, which took a week of gnawing, chewing, licking and otherwise chomping it into tiny ground up bits. I have never seen such an expression of pure joy in my whole life.

DM and I needed to get pet food today so we went off to the only place we know where they sell mixer meal. Since the advent of dog-muesli, the availability of both canned food and of mixer has dwindled across the country so we have to search out what we want. Anyway, while there, we got the two dogs a bone. Rosie’s is too big for her to carry so she’s been standing guard over it ever since. It’s on the kitchen floor so every time Archie walks past, he gets snarled at.

Archie, on the other hand, has been doing laps of honour with his. We’ve got a polo house – one where you can go round the ground floor in a circle by going into the kitchen from the hall, down to the other end of the kitchen, into the sitting room and back into the hall (much to the delight of our smallest human friends too) and Archie has been running round in this circle, carrying his enormous bone in his mouth. It appears to be completely gratuitous in as much as he’s not going anywhere and so far he’s not made any attempt to eat the bone. Maybe he’s looking for a place to hide it but even that can’t be confirmed.

There is a school of thought that bones are bad for dogs but I must say, I think you’d have to have a cold heart to deny a dog a bone once in a while.