Never mind Mr Young - there is a new man in my life. He's just as hirsute as Mr Young, has the same eloquent dark eyes and expressive eyebrows and enjoys having the back of his neck scratched every bit as much as his rival. He is currently snoring contentedly on the sofa. (The similarities to Mr Young are really quite remarkable.)

Yes, of course I know you've guessed. It's a puppy! For the first time in my life, I am a dog owner. He's an English bull terrier called Archie, with a little white collar and paws. Mr Young has Sky-plussed the Dog Borstal series, and our long-suffering postman has been making regular trips to the front door with Amazon parcels containing books called You and Your Puppy, The Dog Whisperer, Dog Training for Dummies, The Perfect Puppy, How to Control your Wife (but maybe I wasn't supposed to see that last one).

Mr Young has also bought some house-training pads, rubber toys and a dog crate, and built Archie a little puppy playpen so that he can run around safely (Archie that is, not Mr Young). This is nicely positioned to catch me painfully on the shin every time I enter the kitchen. Still, I'm sure it's all going to be worth it in a few weeks' time when Archie is perfectly house-trained and will just spend his days lying around contentedly, waiting to be taken out for long bracing country walks whenever I feel like it. (It's a writer's thing, you know. We have to live in a bit of a fantasy world.)

Saturday

Archie has spent a productive 24 hours chewing his house-training pads and mounting daring attempts to escape from his puppy playpen - rather in the manner of Steve McQueen's motorcycle leap over the perimeter fence in the Great Escape. When Mr Young is not thumbing his way through How to Control your Puppy, he is chasing Archie round the kitchen with a small blue rubber toy stuffed with chicken liver paste.

We have discovered that Archie doesn't particularly like puppy food. But he does like chewing chair legs, curtains, fingers, ears, trousers, shoe laces, and pebbles. Particularly pebbles. We're hoping to get him interested in Masterchef so that he can see there is a whole world of exciting food out there; quite frankly, I don't think even a red wine jus could do much to improve a meal of small stones. So far, Mr Young hasn't found "compulsive pebble-eating" in the index of any of our puppy-training books. But, on the bright side, I am building up a nice little library of pictures of Mr Young's rear end as he crawls into the dog crate to retrieve Archie's discarded pebbles and toys.

Sunday

Archie seems to have calmed down a little. Lucy came home for the weekend and he seems very happy to fall asleep in an inelegant sprawl on her lap. And now that the first excited influx of visitors has ebbed and finally flowed, he appears to have worked most of the Steve McQueen-style heroics out of his system. For the time being, anyway.

Monday

Mr Young is now looking for a book on Amazon called "How To Stop Your Puppy Eating Pebbles, Get The Smell Of Chicken Liver Out Of Your Clothes and Stop Your Wife Taking Photographs Of Your Bottom." There's a reasonable chance he'll find one too. Amazon is very reliable.