“They don’t have small animals, do they?”, he asks as he is brushing the bed cover.

It takes me a moment to realise what he means. “Oh, fleas?”, I query and then carry on as it’s rhetorical really, “No, certainly not. I give them drops every month”. Well, I have been since the beginning of April, anyway.

I laugh, though. The time to have asked me was about 6 months ago, one would have thought. They had had a small cake each and then, later, they were allowed on the bed. But, this time both of them, thereby squeezing us to the either side of the bed. Meanwhile F was playing with and singing to Dino – Dino, meanwhile, lapping up the attention and lying on his back being stroked and played with as if it were a small child playing with the dog! “Aren’t you embarrassed”, I said to him, at one point. I actually said this to Dino but, of course, it was for F really.

“They are very, very spoilt”, I said this morning over the Facebook chat, after I had got to work.