She may be a useless fat lump who sheds more hair than she has brain cells, but the one thing you can’t take away from Snipe is her steadfast loyalty, even in the face of living with someone who insists on terrorising the dust bunnies with The Dread Machine (aka the hoover).

Snipe in the snow (18 December 2010)

She was never meant to be my dog. She was my mother’s, who bought her as a pup a month before my then-OH and I moved in with her for a year. Without me even realising it, Snipe decided she had alternative plans, and within a couple of months, picked me as her human.

I knew it was set in stone one afternoon in the late autumn when Mother Dearest, B and I were out in the fields, unloading a delivery of hay into a pen in the ponies’ winter field. Once we were finished, I clambered onto the trailer, to open the gates back across the fields for the farmer who sold us the hay while the others and the dogs headed back to the house on the quad bike.

From my precarious seat on the flat bed trailer, I was watching them vanish over the brow of the hill when one of the yellow blobs running behind the bike stopped, turned and raced towards me instead. It was Snipe and she was quivering with excitement by the time she caught us up at the first gate, tail thumping mercilessly against my legs. She wasn’t too sure about the trailer ride, but walked home beside me and that, as they say, was that.

Last summer, three years and two house moves later, when a group of us went to the pub for Sunday dinner, we left Snipe in my friend Ally’s kitchen. About half an hour into the meal, word spread around the pub that a yellow Labrador was wandering up and down the road, looking extremely distressed. All eyes turned to me… The daft fool had jumped out of the kitchen window and followed my scent up the (mercifully short and quiet) road to the pub!

Kitchen windows aside, Snipe adores Ally and her family, which has made the past couple of days go much more smoothly, as she’s been happy to potter off with them while I’ve been curled up in bed. On Wednesday, however, she did something that counts as a top tribute from dog to human. According to ally, after several hours pottering around her Ma’s place, happily sniffing out rabbits, giving a stray flower pot what for, and pestering the sheepdogs (she loves them far more than they love her), Snipe suddenly decided it was Time To Go Home and parked herself by the car and point blank refused to move until a human was willing to open the doors and drive her back to me.

Being followed as soon as you go out of sight is one thing, but this is in another league and as I look over the snoring heap on the dog bed, I don’t think that she will ever stop surprising me. Whenever she answers my call, turns and races towards me, akin to a charging hippo (grace is not her strong point), or settles down to sleep with her head on my foot, or looks at me and grins, her huge tongue lolling, the deep pools of brown that are her eyes entirely focussed on me, or has a manic five minutes, I find myself in awe of her, and never mind her idiocy, clumsiness and table-clearing tail.

She’s some dog and I still can’t believe that she’s my dog.

PS This tribute happily skips over the more unfortunate episodes involving the sofa, the leather armchair, the bottle of bleach, the electrical equipment, the gear stick and numerous other items…