It was July 1999 when myself and Dad decided to take the tour of Alcatraz prison, San Francisco. True to legend, the boat ride to The Rock was distinctly choppy, raising the old questions about how the three men, who escaped in 1962, could have possibly made it to the mainland alive. The tour was headed by a frustrated stand-up comedian, who spent the duration of the boat ride repeating his joke that New York was full of Italians named Tony, simply because Italian immigrants

I’ve always been sensitive to the breeds of dogs people acquire, wondering often if the paw fits the shoe. Just last week this subject was awoken when the guy next door, someone who I’ve recently become friends with, yelled out over our back fence. ‘Hey man! Come check out my new dog!’ I stuck my head over; to be faced with the closest thing to a werewolf I’d seen this side of a Michael Jackson film clip. ‘We’ve named her Moon!’ he said. The dog was a fully-grown German Sheph