Mourners of the Top Dog,

Sadly, Simon died last night. It was a bit unexpected and it's hard to bear. He was around 11years old, we got him when he was 3. We were his third set of owners; his first owners were two nurses who eventually did not have time to look after him, his next home was with an elderly man who decided he was too old to look after a big dog.

I am not an animal lover, I locked myself in my room when Mother and Father came home with him, I really did not want a dog, let alone one that was the same size as me, but it was difficult not to end up loving or being loved by him. He was a beautiful dog, a Golden Retriever/German Shepherd cross; he always attracted the attention of strangers on walks.

I loved walking him, I probably walked him longer than he wanted to go but I took the stance that if I wasn’t tired by the end, it probably wasn’t a good enough walk for him. He was a great excuse just to get out and clear my head at times, but it was fun to see him in his element.

He had a brilliant character, friendly to everything he wasn’t scared of. He had to be trained to chase cats. I remember him running from a frog and hiding behind me because there was a heron in our path. He was terrified of the wind.

Of course, he was a nuisance at times: my lecture notes would feature compulsory mucky paw prints, I’d end up going out with embarrassing clumps of white hair on my clothes, and he took a liking to my room which would become fur-lined if I didn’t vacuum it on the hour, every hour. No one could be angry at him for long if he had been misbehaving.

I miss him already; he’s not looking out the window as I come up the garden path, he’s not at the door to greet me, he’s not in my room, he’s not hopping about excitedly when I’m ready to spend an hour bogtrotting and when I wake tomorrow, I won’t be squashed into a tenth of my bed because a big dog has decided to share.