When I first took over the Perishers I had a thought. "What", thought I, "does a strip about a bunch of Perishing kids need?" " A dog" came the answer, which was fortunate since it could have come up as a Gorilla or a Rhino and this tale would have fizzled out at this point.

So I asked Dennis Collins, who executed the finished drawings for the strip, to provide me with a dog, a large hairy dog, to become the boon companion of one of the strip's characters - Wellington, a boy named after his own footwear. I named the dog Boot. It was my first attempt at a joke - Wellington's Boot, see? (choke) and Boot first wagged a merry tail in 1959.

But shortly after this I saw, for the first time, an Old English Sheepdog in the flesh, though in the hair might be more appropriate. At once I realised that an Old English was what I'd had in mind all the time. The dog Dennis had produced looked rather more like a lion than a dog and, snag of snags, it had a tail. Old English, I'd observed, were tailless; although I didn't know they were docked. I thought they were born like that in the manner of Manx cats. But an Old English I was determined to have (and, indeed got one of my own shortly afterwards) so Dennis gradually shrank Boot's tail, little by little, month by month - but it was eleven years before we gritted our teeth and had the thing off altogether.

Boot never felt a thing, and to this day I don't know if any of our readers noticed a thing, since nobody ever said.

Of course, to have portrayed a proper Old English Sheepdog we should have provided Boot with blue merle patches but I didn't see how we could have gradually introduced these and so we're stuck with a white dog, which is rare for the breed.