The dog ate my husband's nuts

NO sniggering in the back row, there. It’s true.

The dog has turned out to be a Secret Nut Nibbler.

I’d ticked my husband off for leaving the shells of his Christmas brazils and walnuts in the waste paper bin next to the sofa, because I kept finding sharp pieces of shell on the carpet.

How did I keep finding them? By treading on them in my bare feet, having failed to spot them lying there on the dark patterned background.  Not nice, especially first thing in the morning.

I thought the dog must be fishing them out of the basket to play with. Reader, I was wrong.

He was fishing them straight out of the bowl on the coffee table, cracking them open with his teeth, holding them between his paws, and settling down for a good old chew. But only, of course, when we weren’t in the room, because though he looked up at me calmly with innocent brown eyes when I caught him, he knew he shouldn’t have been doing it.

Having removed temptation from canine nose level, and with every spare surface in the sitting room festooned with swags of greenery, I dumped the bowl in the kitchen, where I shall have to leave it safely every night now.

He’s further disgraced himself by making off with a dog-shaped doorstop, which I retrieved from the hallway minus one floppy ear.

Unfortunately, this doorstop had been given to me by a girlfriend last Christmas, and I’d always suspected that Glen might regard it as fair game so I’d kept it out of harm’s way all year on a chest of drawers in the bedroom, like a sort of heavyweight cuddly toy.

Having invited some girlies (including the doorstop donor) round for a festive soiree and banished my husband to another room to watch the football, we needed to prop the dining room door open so we could listen out for the curry delivery van.

In the five minutes of confusion that followed its arrival as I paid the driver and sorted out three large carrier bags of food, you can guess what happened.

I turned round and there was the doorstop halfway down the hall, with the ear lying sadly and soggily next to it.

However, Glen still has some way to go to match the destructive power of our previous collie, who once demolished an entire silver salver full of smoked salmon nibbles, intended for Christmas dinner starters, after being accidentally shut in the lobby where my mother-in-law had left them to keep cool.