One fine day, while we were sitting in Meg's mother's sitting room, I presented old Tudor, who was only a year old, with a banana skin. Tudor never liked to share anything. He was fiercely territorial and could only be called an Alpha dog, because there is no previous letter in the Greek alphabet.

He obviously detested the trophy, but didn't want to live without it either. After a sly sideways glance he looked for a place to hide it in. We were sitting in "The Good Room", which meant that there was no obvious secret place. But a collie always finds a way. Tudor went to the wall and - as Meg and I watched in disbelief - dropped the banana skin at the wall just under the window and grabbed a tiny corner of loose wallpaper, just under the window sill.

He pulled carefully until he had torn half the strip of paper off the wall in a triangular fashion. Tudor now let go of the paper, picked up the banana skin, stuffed it between the paper and the wall and spent the next ten minutes trying to nose the wallpaper back to where it had come from, in order to hide his unwanted property.