Who's The Daddy: Soothing tunes for the dog as money goes up in smoke

Our Saturday night was spent with our panting, terrified sighthound under a mound of blankets after he nipped outside for a wee at dusk just as a rocket flew 50ft overhead and exploded like an artillery shell.

You know that phrase “like a dog out of a trap”?, well I’ve seen Walter in full flight chasing after squirrels many a time but he’s never moved as quick as that in his life.

After that, fireworks went off over our roof every three seconds all night and poor old Walter looked terrified. Whale-eyed, shaking and panting like he’d been sprinting for 20 minutes with his sighthound buddies.

So we did what thousands of dog owners do on Bonfire Night and tuned into Classic FM’s Pet Classics with Charlotte Hawkins, played through an amplifier so powerful you’d have to rein it in a bit on the main stage at Glastonbury.

Hours of soothing classical music designed to get your pet’s heart rate down to below that of a hummingbird. And you know what? It worked.

Right up until the point Charlotte signed off for the night and David Mellor took over. Walt wasn’t so keen on his musical taste so we switched to the generic Soothing Classical Music playlist on Spotify.

To steal a joke from Chris Rock and adapt it for my own ends; I wouldn’t ban fireworks, I’d just make them £5,000 each. That’d put a stop to it.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it just lasted for a few hours on one night, but people let these things off two weeks either side of November 5 and it’s becoming a massive pain in the hole. Our pets are nervous wrecks in this month-long festival of literally setting fire to money in this country’s worst cost-of-living crisis in living memory.

And as for people who video firework displays on their mobile phones, don’t get me started. We could be here all night. Just ask yourself, when are you ever going to watch it again, as it clogs up valuable chunks of your phone’s memory? OK, I’ll admit, sparklers can be fun, right up to the point when you run out of dirty words to write in the air. After that, you’re just standing around in the cold waving a burning stick about.Anyway soon be Christmas. Ooh, I’ve just gone all woozy after writing that.