I HEARD it on the grapevine that several people have already come forward to express an interest in adopting one of the seven border collies who recently found themselves in the care of local animal charity SNDogs.

Fingers crossed the magnificent seven, who sadly found themselves in the lurch after their owner died suddenly, are swiftly settled into loving new homes.

A word of warning, though, to anyone who decides to take on one of these hounds — collies are renowned for being phenomenally clever.

I have some experience of this up close from going on walks with my particular poochy pal, who is a lurcher of the mostly whippet variety. This means his main joy in life is running. Fast. I mean really fast. I mean breaking the speed limit in residential areas fast.

Having a bit of collie in him himself, the Speedy One likes to say hi to border collies whenever he comes across them — so my pal, owner of said dog, and I, have always been a bit flummoxed when collies show no interest in him whatsoever.

Then it dawned on us. They may look like they’re rounding up imaginary sheep, dropping close to the ground before the chase, but they’re not. They are in fact re-enacting moments from history, such as the Battle of Hastings.

So when the Speedy One comes zooming into the fray they simply look at him as if to say, “What the devil are you doing? You’ve just interrupted the counter charge against the English.” And he zooms off, tail between legs, unable to understand why a dog wouldn’t like running at high speed until he can barely breathe.

We bumped into a collie this weekend who was practising his acrobatics in pursuit of a frisbee. He’d just come from conversational Spanish and was looking forward to an afternoon messing about on his shortwave radio.

So if you are lucky enough to adopt one of these beautiful dogs, I’m certain you won’t regret it — they’re lovely animals and are sure to make someone a loyal companion. Just make sure you brush up on your Latin first and don’t get upset when they beat you at University Challenge.

On a similar theme, we reported this week on Vets 4 Pets who have a policy of allowing staff to bring their dogs to work with them. It sounds like a great idea and I’m keen to introduce it at the Adver, as it would give us all a healthy walk-based lunchbreak and would be good for morale and mental health and so on.

But moving this along a step further, I’d like to see a new policy of sending your dog to work for you. I have a stinking cold — as do most of my colleagues at the moment — and all I want to do is lie on the sofa and groan.

If we could find a few hounds of the clever variety to take over for a few days, I’m sure the paper would still come out (there might be more mistakes than usual, it’s not easy to type with paws) and the recipes in our Menu section might feature tripe and marrowbone rather heavily, but I’m sure you’d hardly notice the difference. They’d be newshounds, after all, just like us.

The weather report

SO it might snow. A bit. Or a lot. We just don’t know. By the time you read this it may have snowed. Or not. You’ll know by then.

That’s the thing about this country — we’re obsessed with the weather and yet totally unprepared for it at the same time. If it rains we get floods. If we have a prolonged period of sunshine we have a drought. If it gets windy untold damage is done, and if it snows, we grind to a halt.

I visited a very small, very steep village in Switzerland a few years ago. Despite being high up in the mountains and prone to several feet of snow all through winter, people went about their business as normal. Nobody had a day off school because it snowed.

But here in the UK, every time we get weather, unless it’s drizzle or partial sunshine and showers, we go to pot.

We don’t have to cope with minus 30C freezes or Saharan highs or monsoons. This is a temperate country — we have boring, middle of the road weather. It’s time we gave our mental barometers a tap and all calmed down.

I spy with my little lorry...

SO the police have a cunning plan to catch drivers using mobiles and getting up to other mischief behind the wheel.

They’re going to use an undercover lorry to catch them at it, a lorry affording them a better view of what’s going on inside a vehicle than a regular police car.

Sneaky, huh? And good on them. Too many accidents are caused by arrogant idiots doing daft things while driving like checking their phone, eating cereal, putting on their make-up... One lorry driver was spotted cooking a meal on a job as he hurtled along in several tonnes of metal. I say take away their licences and never give them back.