When young, my whole self was bursting with crunching hormones just desperate to be released and I fell passionately in love every three weeks or so with any pleasing young maiden who crossed my path … such as Helen who was delicious to behold.

The greatest impediment however to realising my vision of the ‘Promised Land’ with Helen was Rupert, her Brobdingnagian pet spaniel. Just like Mary and her little lamb, everywhere that Helen went Rupert was sure to go. I’ve always loved dogs … apart from Rupert, that is!

One Sunday afternoon Helen and I arranged to have a picnic on an idyllic island pinned down with weeping willows and richly flowering azalea bushes in the centre of a ginormous lake … a perfect location for romantic escape and intimate fullfillment. Needless to say, Rupert came too.

We rowed out to the island, eagerly devoured our roast turkey sandwiches and strawberry slices, complemented by a bottle of Blue Nun, in a kind of youthful re-enactment of that wonderfully salacious dining scene between Albert Finney and Joyce Redman in the bawdy movie of the Fielding novel ‘Tom Jones’. Helen and I then snuggled up to each other on the grassy bank to satiate our other needs.

The sun shone down like a lazy giant in the sky, time was forgotten and the world was nothing but a blue dream. Just as I inched closer to accomplishing my anticipated state f coital bliss, Helen and I were showered by a deluge of cold, dirty water … Helen screamed, jumped up and the idyll was lost forever.Whilst we had been pre-occupied with our fumbling, Rupert had decided to have a swim and then share the experience by shaking it all over us … I shall always believe it was part of some divine doggy intervention to maintain Helen’s honour.

Helen and I never consummated our relationship and we both moved on … me to girls who weren’t accompanied everywhere by pet dogs.