I’m not sure how many installments there will be, but I’m now on my third and fourth chunks, which I’m devouring together rather in the same compulsive way that I see off packet after packet of chocolate peanuts. It’s a gentle, moreish, meandering tale, involving quite a cast of characters. As is usual in sagas like this, I pick my favourites near the start and then urge them on to the finishing line, usually hoping, ridiculous romantic that I am, that they will get married in the final furlong. As my favour has fallen, so far, on Freddie de la Hay, the little Pimlico terrier of the title, and Caroline, who seems rather unlucky in love (ahem), I have no real hopes of a denouement at the altar – but I suppose you never know these days.

McCall Smith’s style, as the world well knows, is aimiably quirky and, as the spy storyline has developed, I have rather impishly wished for things to take a gritty turn, a la Len Deighton or even Patricia Cornwell. Poor little Freddie tortured? Caroline being held hostage? Obviously I have a sick mind, but sometimes you do yearn for the tiniest droplet of acid in amongst the honeyed, effortless prose.  

Oh, but it is scrummy stuff. If you’ll forgive me, I’ll dive back in – I have a little bit more to read before my next dose is sent to me by those lovely folk at the Telegraph. Toodle pip!

The door to the bank now has a special entry portal, like the transporter bay in Star Trek but much less interesting, so even getting in took some time and patience. I then joined a queue which seemed to be made of all the misfits in Dulwich – I had no idea there was so many – and I spent a while wondering if I was becoming one. We all shuffled round, and I thought I was nearly, nearly getting to the front of the queue, when the man before me produced a great sheaf of small plastic bags from his ruck sack, each containing, of course, a selection of one and five penny pieces with which to pay all his utility bills. I was sinking into a glazed-eyed, slack-jawed pre-coma phase by the time he seemed to have finished, having got through gas, electricity, water, phone, telly …..and it took some effort for me to regain enough consciousness to plod forward a little, when he suddenly got out a note, to which Blu-Tack had been pre-applied, and proceeded to stick it to the cashier’s window. It is a measure of how deeply bored I had been that I was actually quite excited at the prospect that this might be some sort of hold-up. Did the note have ‘put all the money in a bag – Unmarked Notes only!’ written on it? All the dispirited queue perked up. Instead of dying of queuitis, we all now had an outside chance of getting on the London round-up at the end of the News at Ten. I had already pictured it all, the headlines in the Standard, ‘plucky divorcee raises alarm at bank heist,’ ‘brave well-preserved 40-something mother of two floors armed robber,’ even my acceptance speech as the Queen presented me with an OBE, ‘it was just instinct, I did what anybody else would have done …..’ I would only wince a tiny bit as she pinned the medal on my plaster cast ….

Alas, it soon became all too clear that the putative bank robber was just another nutter. The cashier peered hard at the note, then said, ‘and did you just want the last two statements, then?’ which rather rubbished all the customer’s brave, though eccentric, efforts at discretion. He nodded, and we all sighed and went back to contemplating our shoes or the long list of not very exciting insurance services Barclays £$%& offers.

Mind you, by the time I finally got to the cashier, I had cheered up a bit. There’s nothing like a display of bona fide oddness to perk me up, and I wondered whether the clerk would mention it. Of course, in true English style, she did not. She heard my tale of codes and surnames in sympathetic silence, absorbed my request for a cheque book, pressed two buttons on her computer and told me one was already on its way automatically and would be with me the following day.

So I needn’t have abandoned my reading, my fireside or my beloved cupboards after all. But I’m rather glad I did, as it’s not often you nearly participate in a bank robbery in Dulwich. Oh, and needless to say, the chequebook did not arrive in today’s post.

I simply wanted to order some cheque books. Granted, I am probably the only person in the known universe still using these, and only because the girls’ school continues to demand cheques for the most piffling sums (£3.50 for a Bollywood dance workshop! £7 for a trip to the British Museum! But doesn’t it all sound bliss? And Child One is going on a visit to Cadbury World soon, I’m so jealous I may have to embarrass her terminally by stowing away on the coach and eating the place dry).

Ok, so there I am attempting to get a new cheque book, to keep up the steady stream of small payments to an educational establishment that clearly doesn’t need them. First, I scrabble through the cheque book itself to see if there’s a tear-off request stub, as in days of yore. Nope. Then I log in to my account online, no mean feat as Barclays requires a Krypton Factor-like row of hoops to be jumped through, including sticking your cashpoint card into a hand-held ‘pinsentry’ machine to get a unique code to key into the right bit on the computer screen ……yawn, the whole procedure seems to go on for days. And if you slip once on the keyboard, it’s right back to the start with you.

I scan the whole of the online bank, and there’s nowhere to order cheque books. Right, it’s time to speak to a real person. I ring the telephone banking service. The automated voice asks for my ‘five digit registration code.’ What? Another code?? If I ever knew this code, it was in a different life. I’m a bit worried that I’ll simply be cut off, as a substandard account holder, but I press on, and eventually get through to a genuine voice. But, as I have flunked the code test, I am treated like a naughty schoolchild who’s produced inadequate homework, or possibly like a rather ineffectual bank robber. Two security questions are fired at me – my mother’s maiden name and my full address. Well, finally, I think, I really can’t go wrong now. I may be useless with codes, but I can certainly remember my own address and the maiden name which I had a lucky escape from.

‘I’m sorry, madam, but you’ve answered one of those questions wrongly. No, I can’t tell you which one. But you’ll now have to present yourself at a branch. No, you can’t ring in again, as you’ve failed the security test.’

Failed a test! Moi? The shame. I may never live it down. I shall have to slink into the branch in the Village and hope no-one sees me. I wonder what they’ll do to me there? The dunce’s cap? Standing in the corner for half an hour? Even, yikes, the naughty step?

So, yes, I am taking my mind off the ordeal in store by reading lovely Alexander McCall Smith’s latest gem. Already, I’ve warmed to the MI6 agent, Angelica, as she went to my university, St Andrews, though of course I feel rather miffed that no-one, during my four year career there, ever once approached me to be a spy. Perhaps my well-known tendency to blab uncontrollably after half a glass of Leibfraumilch (these were the dark days before I discovered Chardonnay) worked against me, or perhaps it was simply that I wasn’t studying Russian, like Angelica. But I manage to get over my chagrin at this snub by the mighty forces of Intelligence, and I read on.

I am loving the way that the cast of characters has already started to entwine a little, reminding me slightly of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music Of Time, though Dog does it with a sense of self-depracating humour and a slightly shuffling, snuffling, doggy gait, unlike Powell’s stately, rather terrifying pavane. Possibly it’s the reference to Poussin in chapter 5, A Nice Boy that’s made me think of Powell. There is, as yet, no glimpse of a character as unique and truly memorable as Widmerpool or even of Pamela Flitton on the horizon, though it’s early days.

Hmmm, Dog is proving a delicious distraction from care, just what we all need these days. Highly recommended. Do have a look online. And let’s all keep our mind off bankers. Grrrr ….

It was a delightful, all too brief interlude and, as I adore book clubs almost as much as I love the Telegraph, I was thrilled to say yes to reading The Dog That Came In From the Cold, the second book in the Corduroy Mansions series by Alexander McCall Smith, of No 1 Ladies Detective Agency fame. Corduroy Mansions seems like an absolute home from home for Telegraph folk (though I suppose Tweed Mansions might be even better) and I am looking forward enormously to starting The Dog and meeting the whole cast of characters. A huge part of McCall Smith’s genius seems to lie in creating these effortless worlds and populating them with people whose quirkiness is only equalled by their charm – so Telegraph it’s not true.

I can’t quite believe I’ve never written about book clubs before. I was in one for a few years in Brussels and then, as soon as I moved to the UK, I scouted around for another and found my current group. I did have the idea, over the summer, of making a little box with the book of the moment, so people could read it too, if they felt moved to. Now, though, I think we should all read The Dog That Came In From The Cold together. Let me know what you think …..