Do dogs grow on you?

I've lived with dogs pretty much all my life. My mother had a weakness for Dandie Dinmonts and Border terriers, because they were funny and then family dogs from childhood morphed into the Married Dog - the Husband-that-Was was a shooter and got himself a Springer when we still lived in London, which then had a litter of puppies. Another addition to the chaos of two working adults, MD and cat in small terraced house in Lavender Hill? Are you mad? Shortly after that a liver and white scrap became My Own First Dog.

I loved MOFD from the moment she became an individual among the mass of squirming, squeaking, snoozing guinea pigs. Some time on her fifth day she lay in the palm of my hand, eyes still closed, little murmurs and yawns stirring her tiny, silky body, helpless and adorable .... and that was it.

I took her everywhere I could. While I worked she went with her mother, to the minders two doors up, except when they were on holiday, or doing their duty as stand-in caretakers of one of the embassies in Kensington. On those days I took her to work with me. She travelled on buses and tubes and took the Drain to the City. She came to the merchant bank with me, the law firm and the video facilities house in Soho. In between we worked on all the theories I'd developed on dog training and and came to mutually acceptable conclusions. I explained that it was impolite to take sandwiches from coffee tables without being invited and she opened my eyes to the joys and dodges of beating on shoots. I pointed out that trying to crash out of the snoopy house at the same time as her mother led to them getting stuck in the door -  she taught me how to take a bird from her mouth without dropping it. We learned to tolerate each other's mistakes. We were a team and something must have been right because we were in demand. And I liked that she was a proper sized, grown-up, working dog.

Then we moved to Somerset and the Husband-that-Was had to travel quite a lot and it occurred to me that, out in the middle of nowhere (actually a small village outside Frome) spaniels that snored so loudly from their straw-choked kennel would never hear any invaders. I wanted a house dog and Zigi the Rottweiler arrived .... although, bizarrely, I had to go back to London to get her.

Most puppies are pretty and Zig was no exception, with perfect, symmetrical, deep golden patches and huge brown eyes. She arrived when our son was at toddler stage, so fitted into the heirarchy somewhere on a level with him: below me as pack leader and (in her opinion) above the HtW and the spaniels. The cat, as all cats do, carried on doing his own thing, superior to all of us. 

She brought another dimension to the household, particularly in the brain department. She was the first dog I'd known that could make you understand the degree of urgency about going outside. She was exceptionally precise (hoovering up individual crumbs that the spaniels had stamped in in their scrambly way) and gentle in the mouth department and the only thing she chewed was her wicker bed which ended up in two neat pieces - the wall discarded, leaving the base to lie on, splayed on her back like some sort of exotic offering on a plate. Oh, and her own nails. When I tried to trim them for her she insisted on eating the evidence - a throwback to survival tactics - like jumping away from any spot where she'd peed, but really she preferred to do her own. When it became necessary to stop the toddler pestering her, she simply nudged him to the ground with a subtle movement of her back end - and then sat on his legs, until someone came and sorted him out. When my mother came to stay and got out whatever W.I. knitting project she was on, Zig would sit next to her, bum perched on the sofa, front feet crossed on the floor .... and laugh.

A pattern seemed to be emerging. Our dogs, from medium size, were getting bigger......