Our "One Dog and her Man" story.

In 1991, 2 years after we bought our Newbury dental practice one of our patients began to ask about details if impression materials and how they worked. She wanted an impression of a dogs paw. She didn't say why.

I told her the pros and cons of the main options and off she went with some material to have a go. Shes soon returned to ask me to do he job properly and went on to say why.

She was a relative of Harry Chapman Pincher, the author, who had written another book, this time not on his more usual topic of espionage which was to be called One Dog and her Man by Dido, his beloved chocolate labrador.  The book was written in the first person, from from the dog's point of view. You know, " I took my man for a walk" etc.

Well to keep up the marketing momentum, Dido and her man had to appear in person on the publication day at the book signing in Newbury and naturally, being the author, Dido had to sign the books, one after another.

So we had to come up with a way to achieve it. Dido duly arrived one afternoon for an appointment in our patient lounge. With much bribery from Chris, using Jaffa cakes, Dido sat still, with a well-vaselined paw in a tub of dental impression material (Impregum) until it had set and we could slurp her paw out of the tub.

Job done, we hot-footed it to kindly John Broughton, of Broughton and Tyrell dental lab, at the time one of Newbury's biggest employers.

There we made a reverse cast again using the same rubbery material and clever John Broughton dreamt up the idea of embedding a rubber stamp into the setting material so the handle protruded. After a little dental technician magic, we had a precise copy of Dido's paw in synthetic rubber with a handy handle.

Harry Chapman Pincher was delighted and used the paw with an ink pad to stamp each copy of the book sold at the public signing.

In 1993 , when Dido had had a litter, he wrote a sequel book called A Box of Chocolates. As a thank you to Chris and me for the work we had done creating Dido's rubber paw, he gave over two and half pages of the new book to the episode at our practice with full credits to us both and the practice. Shame facebook and Twitter hadn't been invented then. Looks as though the book is no longer in print but if you are a real doggy person you can find it on e-bay

We received a framed plaster cast copy of the paw, painted in her chocolate livery as a momento.

The end.