The immutable Law of Sod

15st 5lb, 5.5 units. Making my usual journey from home to my North West office yesterday morning, I glanced as I always do at the window of the antique shop that I invariably have to crawl past really slowly as the traffic builds up on the approaches to Chester. It struck me right away that something about it had changed, but I could not work out immediately what it was. The window was still occupied by that very handsome pine chest of drawers that had been there for ages, and which I would love to own if I did not already have a house full of remarkably similar things. So what was it? Something sitting on the chest of drawers? Oh yes. It suddenly struck me that what had been staring at me for months was a pair of Staffordshire china dogs pretty much identical in size and colour to the ones that I had last seen in pieces on the floor of my friends’ guest bedroom on Sunday.

Surely not: it must have been a hallucination brought on by the stress. But perhaps, just perhaps, they did indeed have the perfect replacement for the ones over whose destruction I had presided, and had merely placed them in another part of the shop when they were rearranging their window display. Mrs H kindly rang them up to ask and – yes – in a truly classic example of the immutable workings of the Law of Sod, they had indeed had a pair of large Staffordshire dogs just like the ones I was seeking, sitting in their window for months. And, at the weekend, someone had finally come in and bought them. Excellent. Not to despair, though, they did have another pair …