WHAT`S IN A NAME ?..

I`ve had a request from my antipodean correspondent to show a bit more of Barney`s progress now that he`s 18 months old. Well, here he is posing on top of the dais with his retriever mates, Shane and Wilson. I should explain that neither Barney nor his friends have won any competition - and it`s not really a dais, as such, but simply a device to help horse riders mount and dismount before or after they cross a nearby pedestrian footbridge over a busy road. But it looks imposing, doesn`t it?

Anyway, Barney`s back in the groove of training for his gold award. He went back to the classes the other evening and joined up with his other compatriots who, for one reason or another, were deemed `not ready` to pass the test when it was held a couple of weeks ago. Barney did very well - he seemed to remember what he had to do and did most of them very nicely, so maybe there`s some hope for him yet.

His two mates in the photo - Shane and Wilson - belong to friends of ours who have a particular penchant for western movies and I believe Shane is unsurprisingly named after `Shane` of the film of the same name starring the late, vertically challenged Alan Ladd. As for Wilson, my initial hunch was that he may have been named after Cotton Wilson, the dodgy marshall in Gunfight at the OK Corral, but no. It seems this Wilson was named after another character in `Shane,` such is the extent of our friends` devotion to that celluloid epic.

As for Barney, well Mrs. Snopper and I, being of a certain age, needed a name we might remember, so we just named him after a bit of the road we live in (Old Barn Road.) On that logic, he might equally have been named Oldie or Roadie, either of which might have suited him just as well, but there`s a fair chance we`ll remember his name is Barney, even if he doesn`t.

G`day, Barb....it is Barb, isn`t it?