Some Photographs I Have Taken Of Dogs During My Adventures In The British Countryside, And Some Important Details About Their Lives

A dog who has fallen out with her husband and step-children for the final time and is feeling the special kind of freedom that can only come from hot-wiring a vehicle belonging to a local tradesman and setting off into the mysterious core of a bright winter's day, unencumbered by personal belongings, with no particular destination in mind.

A dog who has had far too much to drink at a party, watched his girlfriend kiss a rival, and announced "LEAVE ME ALONE MATTHEW, I'm just going to stay here in the middle of the road forever", and who I am now trying to gently and sympathetically reason with, while I also try to decide whether it would be a good or bad idea to tell him I am not Matthew.

A dog I have found loudly singing to itself on some moorland near my house, after following the sound of what I had assumed was Liza Minnelli doing a note perfect cover version of the song 'I Feel Free' by the psychedelic 1960s power trio Cream.

A really stupid dog leaning on a wall, who is taking some time to think about bricks, and why they might exist.

A bunch of dogs who were bored of devouring mechanically recovered meat, being very long and looking quite posh and asked me if they could be sheep instead and are trying to make me feel bad for telling them they couldn't.

A dog who is running excitably towards me across some wet grass, having heard a rumour that for one week and one week only I will do a cut, shampoo and blow dry for just £14.99.

A worried young dog from a posh family who, out on his own for the first time, has got lost at sunset at a notoriously haunted rural crossroads where I often like to dress up as the Devil for fun while sitting on a wall, idly rolling three six-sided dice around in my hands.

Two dogs who have borrowed their mum's car for the first time and are trying to persuade me to drop what I'm doing to go and break into a tennis ball factory with them.

A dog with extremely poor vision who is attempting to climb all the way up to my summit, having mistaken me for a steep and challenging rock formation in his neighbourhood that admirable people talk about a lot.

A dog who has been cruelly filled with ten and twenty pound notes by her local bank, and is wondering what she is more annoyed by: people taking money out of her stomach, or the fact that I have just made the joke, "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. On the plus side, you can sometimes withdraw cash."

A dog whose door I have knocked on, asking directions to the nearest post office, who is now giving them to me, purely through the power of his desperately sad eyes, but tarnishing the full magic of this by neglecting to tell me the vital detail that the post office is now permanently closed.

A self-conscious dog who until this moment had never walked across a bridge, even though he is more than 40 years old, and is trying to remain cool about the whole situation and not fall over in front of anyone influential who might be watching.

A dog I am doing my best to console, after meanly quoting him some hard-hitting statistics about how many fewer people read for pleasure in America, by comparison to only a decade ago.

A dog who is in the process of being beamed up to a flying saucer piloted by aliens from a distant planet who are on a specialist top secret mission to boost that planet's population of small insolent mammals with fur that looks like crap wool.

A rarely sighted dog who lives in a totally different dimension, who is good at leaping, but nowhere near as interesting or magical as she at first seems.

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My latest book is Everything Will Swallow You. You can read extracts from it here and here. My other recent ones (all available from Blackwell's with free international delivery) are - in reverse order - 1983, Villager, Notebook (republished in April!), Ring The Hill, Help The Witch, 21st-Century Yokel, Close Encounters Of The Furred Kind and The Good, The Bad And The Furry.