A heartbeat at my feet...

That's how Edith Wharton, the Pulitzer prize-winning American novelist, described her dog.

It's a pretty apt description and I can't top it.

I got the idea for the photo from a radio programme I was listening to the other day. One of the people being interviewed was talking about Charles Dickens. Apparently he was known to enjoy a drink called a dog's nose, a kind of cocktail, which involved porter (a sort of brown ale), gin and brown sugar, with a sprinkle of nutmeg over the foam! It derived its name from the fact it was wet and black...and maybe from the fact that his friends said, BLEURGH I'd rather lick a dog's nose than drink that! (the last bit wasn't in the radio programme by the way. That bit of extrapolation was mine!)