When my wife was pregnant with our youngest daughter she was constantly followed around the streets by a friendly Dachshund that we named ‘Banger’ after the slang term for sausages in England. We live in China and were never sure if ‘Banger’ had an owner or not or whether we should take Banger into our home but as he looked happy and healthy enough we decided not to.

When our daughter Maya was born we would often take her out to see Banger and he, as usual, was happy to see us. After a while we stopped seeing Banger; we guessed that he had another family to make happy, and so I decided to write a poem about his cousin in London, this was how ‘Banger the Sausage Dog- lost in London’ was born!