FAMILY MATTERS by Jude Dobson

Recently, I was asked to judge the local pet shop's fashion parade. Last year, they asked me to judge their inaugural event and now it seems I'm a regular fixture. 
Maybe they suspect I have a dog that's happy to be dressed up. Our oldest daughter used her as a photography subject about a year ago. She started by putting sunglasses on her and moved on to clothing and jewellery.
I was presented with some very funny pics. Well, funny until I saw my pearl necklace ever so beautifully clasped around the dog's neck. She wore it well. It set off the pink fairy outfit beautifully as she sat ever so haughtily looking like a real "pearl".
Fast forward a year and the dog is still happy to play the girly girl as evidenced by her trotting round the place in bright pink nail polish. Why? School holidays are the only time nail polish is allowed and it seemed one set of nails simply did not scratch the itch so all the girls in the household got lined up. Actually, not all. The guineas escaped.
My initial horror at seeing the dog's pinkness was short-lived given the impending judging job. Small person was desperate to be a part of it all so she and a fellow pink fairy, plus the fairy dog (also in pink) took a wee stroll down the cat-dog walk to get things started. The audience did indeed appreciate the attention to detail with the matching nails.
The lookalike competition put  stunning canines and their owners on parade. There were All Black combos, a synchronised swimmer twinset, a dog and owner  in school uniforms, a cat and her two human companions made a Hannah Montana trio. There was Little Red Riding Hood (human) with her grandmother in glasses, bonnet and comfy knit.
Hot on their six heels was a nurse with a well bandaged dog, complete with fake blood. The prize, though, had to go to a pair of guinea pigs in a beautifully decorated basket on wheels which glided down the runway. They modelled lovely tie-dyed dresses which, of course, matched those on the two girls who glided with them.
Then to the best dressed. The winner was a small dog sporting a piano. A cardboard upright had been fashioned to be worn from neck to tail. It even had a tin-foil candelabra on top, set off with a bonnet made of sheet music.
No doubt about it, the local kids had poured their time and energy over the school hols into coming up with grand ideas for their patient pets.
Disturbing, though, is the off-the-shelf costumes favoured by the adults who entered their small (yes, always small) dogs. Gold lame, pink tutus, polka dot raincoats. All quite worrying. Still, I didn't really have a leg to stand on having paraded my pink fairy.
The most worrying thing of the day happened later when my husband took the dog to a sports store to fit her for a coat for duck shooting. She needs this because she is short-haired and likely to get cold and wet. By then she was devoid of the fairy outfit, but my husband had forgotten about the lolly pink neon nails.
That was until the woman in the store  remarked how nicely the dog's nails went with the camo coat. I think his colour might have matched the nail polish.