The behaviour of the two dogs, the cat and the tortoise isn’t making a particularly good impression on our visitors

There are mornings when I walk into the kitchen to find two dogs, a cat and a tortoise all looking up at me, and think: how did I let this happen?

But mostly I’m used to it, to the eight staring, expectant eyes, and to the extra level of chaos a second dog brings to proceedings. I crunch my way across the room in bare feet, stepping on the remains of whatever items the new dog has recently chewed to fragments: plastic flower pots brought in from the garden, a quantity of unravelled rush matting, some cardboard that may well have been part of this morning’s mail.