I’ve never had a pet. Growing up in a noisy bar with busy people in it, it probably wouldn’t have been fair to a dog to have one, and there’s been a traditional dislike of cats in our family so we wouldn’t have wanted one of them.

After leaving home, I’ve not really had the time or space for a pet either. Again, it wouldn’t be fair to bring one into a small terraced house with no garden or a flat high up a building.

But since myself and TLW got ourselves a nice house with a nice garden we’ve been thinking of getting something to share it with us. Cats weren’t considered, what with them being evil. But TLW had dogs as a child and I’ve always wanted one, so we decided we’d like to investigate the getting of one. I’ve always thought that it would be nicer to get a rescue dog than a pup from a breeder (partly because of fears of this sort of thing), so the pair of us went down to Battersea’s Brands Hatch centre a couple of months ago to see what we could see. And it was very disheartening; they had a couple of dozen dogs there but the staff were pretty insistent that our circumstances weren’t healthy for the vast majority of dogs and that they didn’t think they could help us.

This wasn’t what we expected to hear, if I’m honest. But we persisted, and have been contacting them fairly regularly to see if any changes we made to our situation and their current population would change the decision. It didn’t, so we decided to try contacting the main Battersea site. This was last Wednesday. On Thursday, they suggested one or two dogs that might possibly be perfect for our set-up. We went up at 10:45 on Saturday morning and arrived home with a lovely young thing by noon.

So say hello to Roxy:

Now, lets see how this works out…