TAKING the dog for a drag round the block the other day (she's still not acclimatised to dainty walking to heel, but then I don't think Jack Russells ever are) and I suddenly thought 'whatever happened to dog licences?' It's part of the ageing process that you keep remembering things that aren't around any more. Like Park Drive cigarettes, Spangles, people who came round your door offering to sharpen your knives (yes, I'm that old!). But I really can't remember when dog licences stopped. In fact I can't even remember when they started. To answer my own question I looked it up on Google which immediately answered my question with a 'do you mean dog licenses?' query, to which I replied, 'no I mean licences, I'm British and proud of it so don't you foist any of your clumsy American spelling on me'. Well, I didn't, but only because there isn't the facility on Google to do that. Dog licences, apparently, stopped in 1987, which is 20 years ago. At that time they cost 37p. In 1984 they had actually been 37 and-a-half pence but when half pennies were withdrawn they reverted to 37p (which answers another of my wonderings). This must be the only time in recent history when any kind of tax actually went down. Today the licence would not only not have been reduced by a half penny but would probably have shot up several pence to pay for 'administrative costs' of taking the half penny off. Oh golden days . . . For those who are totally mystified by the previous writings, who never knew you ever had to have a dog licence, I will explain. Having a dog licence was mandatory, just as it is to have a TV licence, and theoretically you could end up with a hefty fine if you were approached by a police officer and asked 'excuse me madam, do you have a licence for that pooch?' and had to answer no. The reality was that police officers rarely bothered, unless they were exceptional jobsworth characters, and so you could go around unlicensed to your heart's content. Which most people did, so by 1987 a massive number of people weren't bothering to get a legal document for Rover or Fang and few people were ever caught. It was really a massive case of civil disobedience on a grand scale, although nobody every thought of it that way. And no, I don't think this kind of thing would work with television licences. Eventually the authorities dropped the licence altogether and those who had been unashamed law breakers were free at last and didn't have to walk on the wild side. It was unusual to scrap a law because nobody could enforce it but it wouldn't happen today because the computer age would have tracked down every last paw. I realise I still don't know if it was a licence per dog or just one for the household, or if you had to have a picture of your dog on it so you couldn't pass off your Alsatian for any other dogs in your household. I do know that many other countries still have dog licences of some sort and in some parts of California you have to have a cat licence. The cheek of it.

Anyone who has aspirations to be a tabloid journalist could take the recent handling of the hostage sailors as an excellent lesson. As far as I'm concerned an excellent lesson on how not to do it, but for those who want to hit the big headlines it shows just what you should do with a big story. The first indication that 15 members of the crew of HMS Cornwall came in a radio announcement. One of our staff misheard and thought the Iranians had captured people off Cornwall, which sounded somewhat unlikely. We envisioned bands of fishermen trying to repel them with well aimed pasties thrown from the high points off the Lizard. Take that Mustafa, they would cry, as a particularly hard short crust fully crimped meat and swede missile flew through the air. So the next day the headlines were obviously full of the outrage, although not much more was known until it was announced that it wasn't 15 of 'our lads' it was 14 and an 'our lass'. Then the tabloids went to town, dragging out aged naval officers who knew the bit of water where it happened, aged diplomats who knew Iran and people who had been in similar situations and knew what might happen. Plus a few psychologists who could tell us what the captives were thinking. Then came the first television appearance of the young woman, who had, horror of horrors, been forced to wear a headscarf. I can imagine the only person who didn't think this was dreadful was the Queen, who spends a lot of her time in headscarves when not in one of her hats. I do remember that the wearing of headscarves used to bring out such venom in a former headmistress of mine that she would give us a detention if she saw us in one on the way to school. We looked, she always said, like common Russian peasants. I would have thought all peasants in Russia at the time were fairly common, but there you go. The story progressed in an inevitable way. Tony Blair popped out of number ten and said a few harsh words and popped back into the warm again. More psychologists explained why people can be induced to confess when under duress, as if we didn't know. More pictures and more confessions were aired. There was general condemnation of forcing our lads and lass to appear on television. This in a country where people will tell you the most outrageous things just to get a five-minute appearance on the box. Admittedly it wasn't always easy to maintain a 'hostage horror' story when the hostages appeared to be relaxed, cheerful and laughing, nor when the men appeared in fairly dreadful tailoring (with Faye getting the even shorter straw of a tracksuit and yet another headscarf) chatting to the Iranian president, and proving for all to see that he's very short indeed. So far so good. For a tabloid journalist there is only one way to go when the great news that the hostages, complete with new suits, were free. Chequebook in hand to get their 'own stories', and if you don't get their own stories you then slag them off for selling it to your rival. So the losers throw up their hands in horror and, like cornered rodents, start attacking. The double standards of this behaviour takes your breath away, because even those who happily printed the 'my hell' stories suddenly turned on those who allowed it to happen and it all, inevitably, turned into a political slanging match. So, that's the lesson, first you praise them to the skies then you knock 'em down. You offer money then condemn them for taking money. You use the word hero in practically every paragraph and then start using the word 'tarnished' in front of it. Hero is an overused word anyway, but don't let this deter you. I hate it because it's unnecessary, because there are perfectly good ways of telling a story without these obvious ploys, because most people are sick of politicising every single issue and because I was taught by old fashioned journalists who certainly didn't believe for one minute the oft quoted homily 'never let the truth get in the way of a good story'. Besides which I'm now working hard on becoming a snappy old bat in my old age and I can say what I want within reason. So there . . . .

Bearing that in mind, I wish to point out to one particular supermarket that frequently shutting down their deli section at lunchtime, because the staff member has gone to lunch (that's what I was told) is not exactly customer friendly as this might just be considered to be the optimum time for people to pop in and buy their scotch eggs and salads etc to eat for their own lunch. But perhaps it's a clever ploy to get us to buy the sandwiches instead.