Brian Viner: We're barking mad to treat pets like this

Throughout April, Titchwell Manor Hotel in north Norfolk is offering free accommodation for dogs. The promotion does not extend to accompanying human-beings, who must pay upwards of £150 per room per night, but the standard doggie tariff of £8 per night is to be waived.

And what's more, four-legged guests get their own beach towel, blanket, drinking-bowl and biscuits, as well as direct access, from rooms on the ground floor, to the hotel's paddock. The offer even tweely raises the possibility of them making friends with the Royal corgis, should the Queen descend on nearby Sandringham.

All this waggishness is inspired by National Pet Month, which begins next week. But is Britain truly in need of such an initiative? Wouldn't it, in fact, make more sense to earmark a month in which we all tried to treat our fellow-humans with as much consideration as we treat our pets? How about National Treat-a-Homeless Person-Like-A-Pet Month, a month in which we give bed and board to a disadvantaged human being, making him or her feel like a member of the family? A barking idea, I know.

It wasn't until I owned dogs myself that I got some insight into the warped attitudes of the British. Walk through any town with a cute puppy on a lead, and you will be fallen upon by strangers stopping to pet it, to ask its name, its age. Walk through the same town with a cute baby strapped into a pushchair and you will be ignored, or even treated as a nuisance. A bowl of water for the puppy? Certainly, madam. A chair where you can sit discreetly and breast-feed? I'm afraid not, madam.

In more enlightened countries, these priorities are reversed. In a small village restaurant in Italy almost 16 years ago, my wife sat at a table feeding our three-month-old son. At a neighbouring table, two fierce-looking truckers rose to their feet and clomped over. I thought for a fleeting moment that they were going to complain, but in fact they had simply come over to coo. In fact one of them bent down so close to baby Joseph's committed glugging that it seemed as if he was going to latch on too. Needless to add, it's hard to imagine that happening in a Little Chef. And hard, too, to imagine Italians stopping in the street to rhapsodise over passing dogs.

On New Year's Day 2007, my friend Tom and I went looking for his missing Jack Russell at the end of a long family walk, in relentless rain, in the Malvern Hills. It's a story I've told before, but seems worth repeating here.

Tom eventually found the drenched terrier being fussed over behind the bar in a pub. He carried her out, deposited her in the car, and then suggested that he and I should go back to the same pub for a warming brandy. But the landlady wouldn't let us in. She said we were too wet. Sometimes, as I mused at the time, this is the maddest country on earth. And National Pet Month is further evidence of the affliction.

There's a conspiracy behind predictive text

Computers have made life incalculably easier for writers. Indeed I'm tapping on my office-issue Dell right now, as the 9.45 First Great Western from Paddington to Swansea pulls into Bristol Parkway. But there is a price to pay, in the struggle for supremacy over the English language between writer and microchip.

My wife Jane is a novelist, and the other day applied the word "unchastened" to one of her characters, only for her Apple Mac to insist that what she meant to write was Unchaste Ned.

I must say that I love the idea of a literary rogue called Unchaste Ned, and tried to persuade her to write him into the story, but she preferred to put the computer in its place, and stuck with "unchastened". There is to be no passage in which Unchaste Ned deflowers a maidservant, more's the pity.

The same battle goes on with mobile phones. Leominster is the nearest town to where we live in Herefordshire, and therefore gets written quite a lot in text messages. But no matter how many times I've written Leominster, the predictive facility on the phone always renders it as Leofric. And since it unfailingly tickles me that something so 21st century as a Nokia C-3 should be quite so obsessed with an Anglo-Saxon chieftain, as Leofric surely was, I keep it switched to predictive.

Jane has a similar problem when writing Kirsten or Kim, the names of two of her friends. Every single time, her phone predicts Kirkbymoorside, a Yorkshire market town she has never visited. Apparently, Kirsten's phone does the same thing, which must be even more inconvenient. We've reached the conclusion that there is a technician at Sony Ericsson who comes from Kirkbymoorside, and likes to keep it in the public eye.

b.viner@independent.co.uk