Rare Breeds

Last summer I visited the royal mausolea in the Home Park at Windsor. The post covered all the good bits, so you didn’t see this.

It looks like a bus shelter but it’s in the grounds of Frogmore House and must be a misguided celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. I’m sure it looked good on the drawing board and that the materials were probably all sourced from the Crown Estates but isn’t it a horror. I suppose on a wet evening it could serve as a place to have pre-prandials but it still looks like a posh bus shelter.

I have become inquisitive about dog breeds, the rarer the better. Walking at Chiswick House yesterday I saw one that I hadn’t come across before: a Humber. “Like the estuary” the owner told me helpfully. Foolishly I didn’t take a photograph because now I can find no reference to Humbers on the internet. She told me that she had really wanted to own a beagle but was told that they run off and don’t come back. Now she has discovered that her Humber, like the estuary, runs off and won’t come back. It was like a big foxhound with a long, off-white coat. Has she invented this breed to make her dog more interesting? The Kennel Club has a list of breeds in danger of becoming extinct; breeds with 300 or fewer registrations in a year.