Sometimes it seems like my world is inhabited by ghosts, such are the remnants and reminders of past lives all around me.

The dead dogs are everywhere. On a coatrack on the hallway wall just near the front door outside my study hang their sun-bleached and harbour-rusted collars and leads, memorial stalactites to much-loved animals who’ve never really left us. Their tags are clipped on the fridge, and one is screwed into the tree in the backyard under which its wearer is buried.

The ashes of the last to die sit in their urn on the mantlepiece to my right. We haven’t quite come around – or been able – to scatter her yet. Too soon! Photographs of them as shiny pups are on the fridge. Line drawings (kindly sent by a professional artist acquaintance when he read of my grief at losing the last one, Ronda), and watercolours, one by an artist daughter, the other by a talented mate, remind us daily that good dogs never really leave us.

I look around the room where I write this. On the wall in front of me hang two........

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