Travelling back from a show on Sunday, I made a beeline for a bank of empty seats on a fairly crowded train. Of course, there is always a reason that seats are empty on these occasions – this time is was because of the small bulldog bitch on the adjacent seats.
I mean that literally – ON the seats. The handlers – amateur actors by all accounts (they were reading loudly, ostentatiously and very badly from a script propped up against the window) – had placed their rather sweet dog on the seat beside them. Excited by the presence of my dog, she then leapt up and down across six seats, shedding hair and depositing paw marks as she went. At one point, I had to shout at them before they finally took notice of me as she was about to jump down on top of my dog, which, given her weight and the height from which she was attempting to jump, would have been unpleasant for all concerned.
It is behaviour like this that gives us all a bad name and, ultimately, will lead to us being banned from public transport – a disaster for a non-driver such as myself.