as when you are unjustly accused of something. That is, there probably is, but none I can think of right now. For today, someone wrongly accused Dog and I of a crime. He could have picked on a whole catalogue of Dog's crimes: trying to attack every dog she met, except Baz (call me Jose the Special One) Border Collie, with whom she behaved in an embarrassing flirty manner; eating seaweed and being sick on the hall carpet; running off after a rabbit and ignoring my shouts for 15 minutes or digging a small crater on the footpath in an attempt to get the mole who had just left a hill.

Our accuser yelled after us 'Aren't you going to pick it up?' and then got shirty when I asked him to advise me on how I could pick up 'a wee' in a plastic bag. He didn't apologize, didn't try to make things pleasant after his mistake. And it rankled.

Because unlike a lot of other dog owners around here, I do clear up after Dog. Every single pocket in every single jacket, coat, fleece I own bears testimony to this, as everytime I reach for a tissue or keys, plastic bags emerge. And they lurk in my handbag, the car, the porch, the shed. And whilst I am glad people do tackle the offenders who don't clean up after their dogs, I just wish they'd make sure that they got their facts straight before wrongly accusing people like us, who feel just as strongly about dog mess as they do.

So today's accusation rankled almost as much as the occasion when my primary school teacher, Mr Davies, wrongly accused me of disrupting the class by flicking an ink pellet at Peter Jenkins, when everyone knows it was Susan Price wot dun it.

I shall console myself with the thought that it will only take another forty years or so until I get over today's injustice.