My wife and I do not have a dog. One of our sons and his girlfriend do, an adorable pomsky, a cross-breed involving a pomeranian and a husky. She stays with us quite frequently and happily, albeit in order to ensure a decent night’s bark-free sleep we have permit her to sleep on our bed- which means I move out. (I admit that’s beside the point.) However, we are now approaching Christmas and there is a lot of bumph around regarding buying presents for dogs, this even though they are notoriously slack about writing thank-you notes. And there is no getting away from it: some of this stuff is essentially canine fashion, and distinctly more upmarket than the box of doggy treats shown on the home page.

For the dog that has way too much of everything, there’s a dog-toy basket, surely a case of £2,800 of anybody’s money being ridiculously badly spent. There’s a dog carrier going for £2,250 and a substantially cheaper one at £289, although I suspect neither of them would be big enough to contain Shadow, our son’s dog, let alone the chap featured in the photo below. Also, I always think it’s a weird look when ‘walkies’ means the human doing the walking while the dog is effectively being taken for a ride. For the ultra-cautious, there’s a dog car seat at £130. For more pampering at home, a dog bed is available at £155.

For rather less money, one could acquire a dog coat from John Lewis (£18) and a patterned dog jumper from Barbour (£28). Dog conditioner can be had for £14 – good luck with trying to apply it! For the more crazy dog lovers, how about a dog spa kit (£16) and/or a book detailing party tricks for dogs (£15)?

They say that every dog has his day. For some of them, that might well be on December 25.