Competitive, warm and conservative: what exactly makes someone a dog person?

Not sure why you love hanging out with your canine buddy so much? Here are the qualities in dogs - and you - that help explain it

My first word was dog", which my mother described as a curiosity, since the d" and g" sounds come from different parts of the mouth. Babies start with mummy" or daddy" precisely to avoid these tongue gymnastics. But it wasn't a curiosity. It was because I wanted a dog. This was definitely nature rather than nurture and, in a house full of cat people, it went unnoticed. My parents started with a cat called Oedipus, and I decline to comment on whether or not that's because they were/are wankers. When they got divorced and my mum kept custody of our cats, we had many more - Mitten, Mutley and Mutley's offspring, plus step-cats Shearer and Le Tissier, in my father's second family, where he sired yet more cat people.

I got to the age of five, and still no dog. The other thing I was incredibly good at, apart from consonants, was finding currency notes on the ground, which my mother always made me give to charity, I think because she thought I was finding" them in people's pockets. I always gave the cash to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. One day, running unsupervised across the road to see my friend, who had a dog, I got run over. In the course of the three months I was in hospital, another wave of Mutley's kittens were rehomed. I cut such a pathetic figure, lying in traction, pretending to care about kittens, saying No? All gone [Strategic sniff]? Now can we have a dog?" We finally got Toby from Battersea, which should by then have named a wing or a dog scholarship after me since I'd sent them all of my income.