People are always asking me if I find things very different having moved from the US to live in the UK. I go on about tumble dryers and food differences and of course the ways in which American English differs from British.

What really amazes me though and honestly sometimes catches me by surprise are moments like this one yesterday when I walked into a shop to see this sleeping dog lounging on the sofa. Clearly used to calling the space his own, he barely budged when I took a series of photographs until I moved in a bit closer to give him a little pat on the nose.

All of a sudden I began to smell the worst odor and thought at first that it might be coming from the now awake pooch. I thought surely the noxious smell could not have come from this cutie. There was a very large Irish Setter on a leash sitting a few feet away while the two women it was with were looking at the ceramic lamps on sale and I glanced over at it suspiciously.

I’m not sure why I decided it had to be the big red dog sending out the toxic fumes, but as the two women with him moved away to another part of the shop, I hurried out to meet my husband John who was waiting for me at the start of the path that would take us back to our car. He was walking in front when I heard a noise behind me and turned to see a woman with what looked like the dog I had photographed only a few minutes before as it lay splayed out on the sofa.

We stepped to one side of the narrow path so the woman and dog could pass and I said to John that I thought that had been the dog I had caught napping. A few seconds later an overpoweringly familiar stench hit my nose and I knew that I was looking at the moving backside of the odoriferous culprit whose sleep I had disturbed in the village shop giving a new meaning to the old adage, ” let sleeping dogs lie. “