Your dogs won’t like it when they come to stay; that kennel stinks,” said my father almost 40 years ago. He had given up keeping dogs by then, but there was still a kennel at the bottom of his garden so he could board mine when I was going away.
Dad was a keen vegetable gardener and if there was one thing that would really wind him up it was the neighbours’ cats, or in this case a vixen, digging in his carefully prepared onion bed. This particular year the crop rotation brought the onions right alongside the kennel, so he had “left a lamb bone from Sunday lunch in it, rigged a figure-of-four trip to hold the door open, and stretched a bungee to snap it shut”. One night was all it took, and bingo.
When we
