where it all began

One Christmas Day, aged about 7, I wrote in enormous letters in the snow  - right outside my parent's bedroom window , those immortal words ‘I WANT A DOG’ . Now apart from the wanting side of things I hadn't given much thought to breed of dog - my father was very much a spaniel sort of man and to me dog  clearly meant spaniel. But, what I didn't know, as I stamped out those words in the snow, that the arrival of a new dog in our houshold  would almost cause the death of my mother. 

Now back in the day,‘designer dogs’ hadn't  come into play,  no labradoodles or cockerpoos roamed this earth. Dogs were dogs and a mixed up dog was clearly just a Heinz 57! And yet my father, a stickler for tradition, surprised us all and accepted the gift of a puppy from one of his grateful patients and what a mistake that was. The puppy was a Lucas Terrior, an extremely rare breed that was only created in  the 1940's by a Sir Jocelyn Lucas when he crossed the Sealyham Terrier with a Norfolk Terrier.  The intent was there, but the design was poor and I ended up with an inbred , rough coated, epileptic dog in place of the silky coated floppy eared spaniel that I had imagined.