Portrait of Alan Coren

Alan Coren

Waiting For Jeffrey

Robson Books, 2003.

Always hotly contested, this year's Golden Bootscraper, sponsored by the Doormats'R'Us chain, went to Spot of Camden Town, a mongrel who, though completely untrained, not only succeeded in making two-thirds of Primrose Hill unfit for human use but also wiped out four beds of Ena Harkness in the Regent's Park Rose Gardens, fused 11 Camden street-lamps, and was responsible for having a Baker Street phone-box melted down for scrap

From Four Bad Legs, one of the newspaper columns republished in this book, in which the author denounces the 'farrago of entirely unreal qualifications for championship status' at the Crufts Dog Show and suggests some realistic alternatives.