IT was the end of a shaming week when my irresistibly entitled whippet had committed outrages all over the country. In Cumbria, he was banned from yet another drawing room for, on entry, cocking his leg up a pair of exquisite silk curtains belonging to the editor of a glossy interiors magazine.
Confined to the kitchen at a house in Hertfordshire, he rapidly worked out how to open the back-stairs door and led my hosts’ two incontinent Italian greyhounds on a rampage through bedrooms with plush, new pale carpets. In Scotland, as everyone sat down to supper, I saw tooth marks in the butter that could only have come from one smug-looking whippet, sprawled on the sofa licking his lips. I smoothed the marks away by sleight of hand, hoping that no one noticed.
At awkward times such as these, I seek solace in the classics—there is always an appalling emperor to put everything in perspective—and among friends with animals more outrageous than my own. For anyone else who despairs of their pets’ bad behaviour, here is a room-by-room investigation of
