Odds-on for a swift end

All right, chaps, this is what you've got to look forward to. You work an 18-hour day, seven days a week, for 25 years to pay off the mortgage on a house that's much bigger than you ever wanted, not that you ever see it in daylight, because you're always at work.

Then at the age of 53, just as you make the final repayment and look forward to early retirement, you undergo what we doctors call a Mega-Blair, or a "heart incident" (aka a massive fatal coronary brought on by overwork), and are cremated.

Your wife inherits your pension, puts your urn on the mantelpiece as a mark of respect, forgets to dust it, then hides it in a cupboard, and finally throws it into the dustbin because it reminds her of you and gives her the creeps. Then she invests in a facelift and breast implants, and squanders all your hard-earned money on some lazy good-for-nothing toy boy with a washboard stomach, who promptly spends it on chemicals - not Viagra (he doesn't need that), but simply on powdering his nose.

Things are little better for the breadwinners of the canine world, as we saw last night on Metroland: Old Dog New Tricks (ITV1). After running around the stadiums of London on behalf of their betting-crazed human owners for three or four seasons, 10,000 greyhounds are forced into retirement each year, and for most of these dogs who've had their day, the future is very bleak indeed.

The cameras followed Xamax Na Tally as he finished chasing his last electric bunny and was unceremoniously carted off to the kennels of Wimbledon Greyhound Welfare, yet he was one of the lucky ones.

At least he had a sporting chance of finding a new home, whereas many racing dogs are simply put down (a cruel business, which I understand involves a vet looking them in the eye and saying: "Call yourself a runner? You're rubbish, you couldn't even run a bath," and so on).

Regular readers of this page will know that we favour Felis domesticus over Canis familiaris, even though cleaning the average house cat can be a bit of a nightmare (in my experience, the worst bit is getting the fur off my tongue afterwards). But even a hardened dog-disdainer like me shed a manly tear at soft-focus shots of Xamax wearing an "I need a home" jacket, and mournfully trying to ingratiate himself with visitors.

Kennel manager Denise Dubarbier did her best to unload him, telling one family who thought he was too big for their property that "when they live in a house, they get very, very small", and assuring others who thought he might be too boisterous that "95 per cent of the time he just sleeps". Which is all very well, but surely, if near-total inertia is considered to be a selling point, wouldn't they do better to go the whole hog and simply buy a stuffed greyhound?

By now, the programme was resembling a promotional video for the Wimbledon Greyhound Welfare, with Magic Moments playing on the soundtrack as Xamax stared soulfully into the lens and a poem (well, a piece of doggerel anyway) being read aloud by Jilly Cooper (one of the nicest people I've met in this wonderful business we like to call the show).

But still nobody adopted him, and when we were told that "Denise is becoming worried about his chances", I started to fear that he might end up "going to a farm in Wales" (the euphemism used when I was a child for a lethal injection in the back of a canine neck).