Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I cannot recall saying very much else at all to Strauss during our first few weeks together.

Not that it was the first time I had undertaken the task of toilet training a puppy: it had fallen to me to domesticate the family chocolate Labrador, and nothing could possibly be worse than a dog taking such fiendish delight in eating his own faeces that well over six months were required to persuade him to crap anywhere other than on our floors – for how else was he going to speedily locate a snack?

But the primary difference when potty training Franck the Labrador, was that I had lived in a house with a door leading directly out onto a garden. While Strauss and I inhabited a third-floor apartment in a building with no lift and with an entrance door leading out onto a grass-less, tree-less but predictably pedestrian-full pavement.

I must have raced down those stairs an average of twenty times a day, bemused puppy tucked firmly under my arm, only to then have to watch him wander aimlessly up and down the road for ten minutes, sniffing at anything and everything before coming back up to the flat and immediately letting rip all over the floor tiles (and of course nowhere near the newspaper that had been carefully put down for that purpose).

Thus the whole process would start all over again…

There was certainly supposed to be a method to my madness:

• He was taken out regularly to try and avoid accidents and praised copiously if fresh-air deposits were forthcoming.

• If he looked as if he was working up to micturate, defecate, regurgitate or indeed anything at all that involved a messy bodily excretion, he was taken out.

• If despite all the precautions an accident still could not be avoided, he was roundly ticked off before being taken out.

So, as you can probably see; there was a great deal of taking out to be done – single-parenting really is no easy matter.

But after about a month of running up and down stairs, skidding around on endless, pointless (and badly-written) pages of tabloid, only to step barefoot into steaming piles on my way to the loo in the middle of the night; Strauss just suddenly seemed to see what I had been getting at and almost overnight became a world-class pavement re-decoration artist.

(And before you get all worked up, yes I did scoop-the-poop – in those days, the Ayuntamiento de Marbella kindly supplied all dog owners with free bags for that exact purpose.)

House-training issues aside, Strauss and I had what could only be described as a coolly cordial relationship during those first few weeks.

Haunted by the sad events that had preceded our meeting, I found that guilt and misery tinged all puppy-related matters. I was backed helplessly into a corner by demanding puppy needs, strange puppy odours, scattered puppy detritus. It just all felt so…… wrong.

Yes, I took care of all his immediate requirements: I fed him, walked him, played with him, handed huge amounts of cash over to the vet for him; but I just couldn’t bring myself to love him.

In a moment of hangover and remorse-driven thoughtlessness, I had chained this dog to me for a lifelong yet half-hearted partnership.

And then I got a phone call from my ex-colleague – the same ex-colleague who had misguidedly entrusted me with the life of Strauss’s tiny predecessor, and who had cried along with me as she forgave me for falling so very short on my responsibility to provide it with a long and happy life. She had even shared her own story of losing a dog in a balcony fall, her loss taking place on the exact day she had been moving abode to escape that particular danger.

This time she was ringing to say that they had one little pup left, and that it would make her and her boyfriend very happy if I would agree to give it a home.

I bawled all the way back from work: I cried for my lost dream of that first little Andrex puppy, I cried for the predicament I found myself in, I cried because I so longed for a cute little roly-poly puppy and I cried for what that longing would mean for the skinny little Podenco waiting for me at home.

I felt trapped in a no-win tragedy of my own making, so I was completely unprepared for what happened when I eventually opened my front door, looked down at the little mongrel wagging up at me, and for the first time actually saw him:

Black on top, ginger along the sides with a soft blond undercarriage and a long whiffly nose. His disproportionately huge ears standing at proud right angles to his head before abruptly dropping down halfway along their length in the manner of drying cormorant wings. His long, skinny tail permanently poised to wag; a movement that carried along the length of his equally skinny trunk, making each moment of happiness all-encompassing. His huge, hazel brown eyes outlined with perfect thick black rims…

The love that hit me was instantaneous, life-changing, all-consuming: in the tradition of the best romances, I managed to locate my true feelings only when faced with the prospect of being separated from the object of my affection.

The little chap must have been rather taken aback by such an abrupt up-turn in events, but he very soon became used to the inconvenience of being adored, and returned that adoration in quantities so immense and so endlessly enthusiastic, I would spend the rest of his life trying to be deserving of them.