The Curmudgeon

It was quite by chance. It didn't deflect those awful people who have spent a century concentrating on their primary task. But it has put Mildew Meldrew behind bars and that has made a lot of people in the North of England happy.

This, I realise, demands an explanation. How can dogs send a man to jail? And, before we get to that, what exactly is the primary task of the people who support Crufts?

Well, the latter is simple. Those strange ladies with funny high-pitched voices, bogus upper class accents, and a dress sense straight out of the 1950s have spent tha past 100 years inter-breeding brave, healthy, useful and mentally stable working animals - i.e. dogs - into spindly, neurotic, arthritic, shambling wrecks.

Pedigree dogs are not dogs any more. They are dolls, toys, fashion items, with all sorts of hereditary diseases bred into them.

The great British bulldog can't breath any more because its face has been pushed in so much its nasal passages are blocked, and golden cocker spaniels, once the national favourite became infected with a "rage syndrome" so serious that they became a menace to young children.

English pointers suffer from the shakes and Irish red setters, once the most magnificently athletic of all gun dogs, are now as thin and tall as giraffes. Nobody even knows that the poor, bad tempered and totally useless miniature poodle was bred down from the standard Alsatian sized model which used to be a water fowling gun dog.

In other words, it used to dive out of punts in saltwater marshes to drag back wild geese shot by its master. That was a real dog that was.

Now, such creatures are substitute children for fawning middle aged matrons and it's time we had a Campaign for Real Dogs before the rest of these once wonderful breeds are bred down to become mere ghosts of canines past.

But, a reader might reasonable ask, what the heck has all this is to do with cracking crime?

Well that's quite funny, actually. Last week, I reported that a lady had been arrested because her Pyrenean mountain dogs had been worrying Owd Tom's ewes, a capital offence in the countryside with lambing about to start.

It turned out that she was in the village, en route to the aforesaid Crufts, to pick up mail at the Quarry Row cottage bought last year for a large fortune by our mystery man, Mildew Meldrew, the only name we ever knew him by.

That mail, we now know, contained lots of cheques from poor suckers throughout the North to whom he had promised £25,000-a-year jobs working from home - for an introductory fee of £250, of course.

The Dog Lady, as she is now known, was Mildew's close friend, as the tabloids say. But a tough nut never the less, who steadfastly refused to give away her lover's whereabouts.

Until the police persuaded Owd Tom to press charges for sheep worrying, that is. Which could have mean a totally justified death sentence for the lady's untrained dogs, which used to protect Spanish sheep flocks from wolves but which would now prefer to take lumps out of pregnant ewes.

Tell us where the boyfriend is and we'll get Owd Tom to drop the charges, said the police. There was never any contest. So Mildew Meldrew is behind bars facing fraud charges which, we are told, involve sums in excess of £1 million.

And that is undoubtedly the most useful thing Crufts has achieved in a whole century!

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.