Eyes of the future

Went with friend L for an outing and some Saturday girl time. First we visited a favourite farm shop in the Darenth Valley. Come summer, the fields there will be filled with the glorious rich colour and scent of lavender, but for now the farm staff are just glad that the winter floods have gone.

Then we went to a nearby café on the edge of the Lullingstone Castle estate where we met these two Guide Dogs for the Blind puppy walkers with their charges, eight-months-old black Labrador Gunner and Labrador-Golden Retriever-cross Stanley, just six months. What beautiful pups, so calm, friendly and even-natured.

The volunteer walkers take the specially-bred pups at seven weeks and keep them to 14 months old: generally training and socialising them, and gradually exposing them to all manner of life experiences, including road drilling workmen and busy shopping malls. Then the young dogs begin their intensive training for Guide Dog work. It costs around £5,000 to train a Guide Dog, and some £50,000 to sustain it through its life's work of about nine years. At around age 11 the dogs retire into family pethood. What a busy decade these two have ahead of them.