was eating my breakfast when I heard an ominous thump emanating from what an estate agent grandly described as “the garden room”. The big window gives a fair view of the arable prairie behind my meadow but on a sunny morning holds a large area of glaring double glazing. It’s usually in summer that we find a stunned woodpigeon, collared dove or blackbird that has flown into the window pane, but this winter morning’s collision proved fatal to the unfortunate cock blackbird. It was only as my dog Nell gently delivered the stiff corpse to hand with nary a ruffled feather that I thought about the hard- and soft-mouthed dogs I have owned and encountered over
