Welcome to "Man with two dogs" - the family website for dog owners and dog walkers.

BLACK SHEEP mostly get a bad press, so the Doyenne and I were surprised to see a whole flock of pure black sheep in a field just outside St Fillans, at the east end of Loch Earn. With dogs, and what seemed like everything bar the kitchen sink in the back of the car (how do people manage to travel light?) we were on our way for a holiday on the west coast.

“KEEP OUT, Viscuous Animals” was the notice painted on the door of one of the outhouses, commandeered by our son as his personal “sheddie”. We never suffered the fate of Aunt Ada Doom in Stella Gibbon's comic novel “Cold Comfort Farm” who went mad on account of seeing “something nasty in the woodshed”, but the implicit threat was there.

CRAIGIE COLUMN has been publishing an interesting correspondence about the absence of garden birds from readers' feeding stations. Some birds migrate away at the end of summer but, with the exception of the woodpeckers, we don't expect to see much activity at our own feeders at this time of year.

THERE'S AN old walled garden with a burn running through it not far from the house. I sit on the bridge over the burn while Inka plowters about in the water which is full of wild water cress. It would be grand if Macbeth was a water dog too – he might be a bit cleaner more of the time – but, for such a foul animal, he's surprisingly fastidious about getting his feet wet.

LAST SATURDAY, you may recall, was an absolute  sconer' – the sun shone out of a peerless sky and there was just the breath of a wind to shake the heads of the grasses. The Doyenne took an executive decision to abandon all our sensible plans for the weekend – nothing was so urgent that it couldn't wait till another day.