Sophia Money-Coutts

The valet parking man at Gatwick climbed out of my car with an expression that suggested he’d just driven a Panzer at the Russian border as opposed to bringing a very underpowered VW Polo around from the car park. ‘Madam,’ he began, unsteadily. ‘I need to have a word with you about the state of your car.’ I apologised. My Polo is an abysmal state. Empty coffee cups, paper napkins, crinkled bags that once contained sandwiches or doughnuts, plastic water bottles, 58 hair ties, decaying dog biscuits and poo bags (albeit unused) all litter the floor. It’s also disgracefully muddy because Dennis doesn’t go in the boot. He either sits beside me in the front, or lies along the back seat as if I am his chauffeur and he is a debutante who’s overdone it at The 400.

Have you read your copy of Dogue, yet? It’s become an annual project: Vogue’s dog issue. Instead of hungry, cross models in elaborate costumes and articles about the sartorial importance of the earlobe, it’s all dogs. A dog on the cover and dog ‘interviews’ alongside fashionable people talking about their dogs. Fittingly, the Dogue competition winner and cover star does look quite hungry. He’s a thin dog (of course) called Sir Spud who appears to be an Ibizan hound. Very Dogue, though, to have an Ibizan dog on the cover. Sir Spud was apparently named by Catholic nuns, would be voiced by Ian McKellen in a film about his life, is a Cancer ‘through and through’ and likes cashew nuts.

Dennis refuses to step on to the scales at the vet. Perhaps he’s nervous about his holiday weight. The upshot is that I have to climb on the scales holding him, and then again without him, so the receptionist can work out the difference. It makes for quite a humiliating morning, shouting my weight across a crowded veterinary waiting room. A woman clutching an elderly cat looks determinedly at the floor. It’s our third trip to the vet in a week. Grass seed season is particularly bad this year, they say, on account of the heat, which has turned the seeds brittle and more likely to penetrate paws and ears. Local councils and their obsession with rewilding is also to blame, chunter some dog owners, since they’ve used this fashionable eco policy as an excuse not to mow.

‘No dog of mine will sleep on my bed,’ I swore, before Dennis came along. People who allowed dogs on their beds were feeble, I believed, not far removed from the sort of parent you overhear in restaurants saying: ‘Persephone, if you do that again Daddy’s going to get jolly cross.’ I’d be more disciplined. My dog would sleep in the kitchen, like any self-respecting normal dog. Dennis arrived, just ten weeks old, and on his first night was duly shut in the secondhand crate I’d bought on Facebook Marketplace for £20, from a woman who owned a mastiff called Hades. This crate was in my kitchen. Might my single status and attitude towards dogs on beds be somehow correlated, I hear you muse I went to bed and tried to ignore the pitiful mewling. Guess how long I lasted?

Two summers ago, when Dennis was a puppy, I went to the vet to get the 793 bits of paper (one-time entry only) now required to take a dog to Europe. ‘That’ll be £265, please,’ the receptionist told me. ‘What?’ I cried. ‘He could go to Eton for less!’ This didn’t seem to elicit much of a response from the receptionist (more of a Harrow woman, perhaps?), so I duly paid up and left.

Back in the day, Chelsea Flower Show was regarded as the beginning of the Season. Queen Alexandra opened the festivities in 1913, when it moved from the Embankment to its current location in SW3. It must have rained that day for there’s a terrific photo of her (dressed in black, so jolly) strolling beside several gentlemen in top hats, and all are carrying umbrellas. There was considerable grumbling about Chelsea this year, however – too crowded, too many shops, and it was sponsored by that nature-friendly marque, Range Rover. May I suggest a contemporary alternative to herald the start of summer? It’s Goodwoof. This is the two-day dog festival held in the leafy grounds of Goodwood every May.

A couple of months ago, an invitation arrived. Would I like a room at the Savoy for the Baftas? I could attend the awards, guzzle champagne, walk the red carpet alongside Demi Moore and Ariana Grande and so on. Sadly, I replied, I was already booked up that weekend as a judge for a very different kind of competition: the World Marmalade Awards in Cumbria. This year marks the 20th anniversary of this event, held at a whopping Grade-I listed house just outside Penrith, surrounded by stone walls and sheep. Ahead of time, all judges were told to bring warm clothes, so I drove from London with a suitcase of jerseys. Upon arrival, I was shown to a room with a four-poster bed (given to the family by Queen Anne) but no heating. There didn’t seem to be central heating at all, in fact.

Marmalade’s had a rough old time of it lately. A recent report in the Telegraph declared it is dying out; that only oldies are buying it because millennials can’t handle ‘bits’ in spreads. Well, excuse me, but I direct you to this year’s World Marmalade Awards, held a few weeks ago in a big Georgian house called Dalemain just outside Penrith, which attracted nearly 2,000 homemade jars from around the globe. Big jars, little jars, jars decorated with glitter, sticky jars that had leaked in the post, jars with gingham hats. All laid out on trestle tables with individual, handwritten tasting notes from the WI judges underneath, marking each jar out of 20.