How did you come to own a Basset? I never planned on owning one. Like many people unfamiliar with the breed I had thought of them as dull, lazy dogs, lacking character or charm. Ha!

The time had come for a new dog in the family. Our little lurcher, Georgie had left us, aged 18, just over two years before. In that time I had moved to a new house and volunteered for the Cinnamon Trust, to walk and foster dogs for elderly people, but it just wasn't the same without a dog of our own.

So, the girls and I drove out to a rescue that had an overcrowding problem and was begging for new homes for its inmates. On the phone they had mentioned a blue greyhound, which sounded hopeful, and a couple of lurchers, so I felt sure we'd be able to offer a good home to a needy dog.

This facility was muddy, unkempt and run by a very well-meaning elderly lady and a middle-aged man whose use of the choke collar was, I felt, too harsh and too frequent.

They showed us one dog that was too sick and another that was two big. Then they said: “Well, we have got a basset hound”

My younger daughter was almost dancing on the spot. She had been begging for a basset for months. I turned round and looked at this shaggy, low, dog. A Basset? Surely not.

Bassets have short hair. Not this one, he is a long-haired Basset.

As I squatted down to speak to him, he leaped up and put his stubby legs on my shoulders. Not expecting this, I tumbled backwards into the mud.

We took him up the hill for a walk. Boy was he pleased to get away from that place, I now know he had been there for more than six months, a large chunk of time considering he was just over two years old.

The mud had dried on my back by the time we got back from an enjoyable stroll inspecting every last bush and tussock with this enchanting little fellow.

The elderly woman looked hard at me. “I think you're mad,” she said. “They’re horrible dogs. You will have to make sure he knows who’s boss or he’ll walk all over you.”

Even the man looked surprised. “Get on the internet,” he advised. “Read everything you can about the breed.”

I opened the back of my car and for the first and last time since I've known him, Rolph jumped in. He really was desperate to leave that place.

So there he was, my accidental Basset, and the next three months proved to be the biggest learning curve of my life.

Every dog I’d owned previously had slept in the kitchen. Rolph could open the fridge and the cupboards as well as reach all the counters, and thought nothing of helping himself to whatever he found.

My dogs had never been allowed in the bedrooms. Rolph made it quite clear that he was not sleeping anywhere else.

He snatched food off our plates as we ate at the table, chewed up every pencil and pen in the house, ate  socks and undies, charged round the house smashing into walls and furniture, used a rug on a wooden floor as a go-kart and went through people’s pockets - including visitors’ - to steal anything he could find.

No bin, be it kitchen, bathroom or bedroom was safe from him, even so-called lockable ‘dog-proof’ bins. He raided the laundry hamper just as easily.

But his worst vice was using the sitting room as his potty place.

I believe he had been housetrained. Certainly he knew his obedience. Someone at some point had spent a lot of time teaching him all the basics and a few party tricks, but he would pee as a statement. Never when he was left alone, always when I was there and he felt he wasn’t getting enough attention - and that included when I was asleep.

He was a nightmare. And yet, there was clearly a very sweet, loving boy in this firebrand.

I resorted to the internet and found a Basset-owners forum www.dailydrool.com

Signing up, I quickly learnt much of his behaviour was just down to being a young basset.

With heaps of support from experienced owners, who included people who breed show champions, and work in the many American Basset rescues, I learnt how to help him.

In turn he learnt I wasn't going to give up on him and we both relaxed.

Yes, he’s still the worst counter cruiser I have ever met, he still opens the fridge and cupboards if I leave the kitchen door open and he is never slow to grab unattended food.

But he is such a character I cannot imagine life without him - or Clara who joined us eight months later from Basset Hound Welfare.

I guess he was just an accident waiting to happen.