We Bought An Old Officers' House And The Dog Salutes The Stairs

The house was married quarters, sold off in the nineties. It is ordinary: pebbledash, a garage, a garden my wife has opinions about.

Our dog is a collie cross with a brain the size of a walnut and a work ethic that shames me.

Every evening at about six, she goes and sits at the bottom of the stairs, facing the fourth step, ears up, tail flat on the floor. Not wagging. Still.

She does it for perhaps two minutes, and then she gets up, shakes herself, and goes and lies down.

My wife calls it "the salute", which started as a joke and stopped being one.

There is nothing there. We have looked. We have stood on the fourth step, sat on it, taken photographs of it, and had a plumber accidentally spend an afternoon working two feet from it while we watched him like lunatics.

Nothing.

The previous owners had it for eleven years. I found them, through the estate agent, because I am the kind of man who finds people, and I wrote a very careful letter that I rewrote four times so as not to sound insane.