AT AYTON Castle, Lady Christine de la Rue, in red jumper and jodhpurs and wearing dusters on her feet, is skating around what appears to be 27 miles of wooden hall floor. A polishing trick she picked up at the Pucci Palace in Florence. The fire is blazing, sandwiches are laid out on the grooms’ table in the hall – where they play ping pong and do Scottish reels – and Highland terriers scamper about.

The mistress of Ayton Castle, Berwickshire, is a colourful character with a past as dramatic as her castle.

She had a three-year love affair with Prince Michael of Kent. At the time, she was married to the late Sir Eric de la Rue, a man 36 years her senior, and the Prince was a bachelor. Christine, 53, talking for the first time about the relationship which ended in 1975, looks worried. Prince Michael is still a friend. And Christine is loath to jump on to the kiss-a-Royal-and-tell bandwagon.

This expert horsewoman and Captain of the Ayton Castle polo team laughs, remembering the Prince’s reaction when first she invited him to stay in Scotland. ‘I don’t like horsy people,’ he complained. ‘Their houses are so dirty.’ Now he rides with her. And her Gothic-revival schloss, where the Prince, Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia and Christopher Lee have stayed, is as spotless as a Zurich hospital.

Christine, a blonde Norwegian, lives with David Liddell-Grainger, the father of two of her children. She has been providing the Borders with society gossip for years, and has just finished writing what promises to be a compelling autobiography.

Her first marriage at the age of 19, to a Greek lawyer, was annulled after two years because of non-consummation.

‘I wasn’t in love with him,’ she says girlishly, with nervous speed. ‘I married to run away from my mother who told me I was ugly and stupid.’ With the approval of her next husband, the elderly Sir Eric, Christine scandalised local puritans by having a publicised affair with David, who was married to Anne, a cousin of the Queen. ‘Eric was spritely and a father figure but he wasn’t interested in sex after our son St George was born.’ She divided her time between the two men in what was seen – erroneously – to be a bizarre love triangle, and after Sir Eric had a mild stroke he moved into the castle with them. When Christine and David’s son David Henry was born, Sir Eric and David were at the christening.

Christine is not the hard-boiled woman oft portrayed. She’s special – delightful, shrewd, forthright and exuberantly energetic. The warmth of the castle reflects her personality.

FOLLOWING the Norman invasion, a formidable fortress was built at Ayton. When it burned down in 1836, James Gillespie Graham built the present turreted red monster which Henry Liddell, David’s grandfather, bought in 1888.

Until David was eight years old – when his father died and his mother shut up the castle – he lived here with 40 servants. It was used during the war as a girls’ school.

In the Fifties, David camped occasionally in the master bedroom, looked after by one Miss Denham. ‘She mended his long johns and cooked for him.’ After his grand marriage, with a reception at Windsor Castle, he took tons of his furniture out of storage (all had been stored easily in the castle drawing room, natch) and returned to live in the castle. David crammed his fine collection of Chippendale furniture and Staffordshire figurines alongside buys from country house sales.

When Christine moved in, the rooms were gloomy and pigeons roosted in the towers. ‘Ayton was mortgaged. No, I mean morgue-ish.’ For 12 years, Christine has been restoring the interior to its original baronial splendour. ‘David’s wife had put up dishcloth curtains.’ She has worked to a tight budget. ‘I’ve used remnant wallpaper and chosen colours to last 100 years. The dining-room round table cloths are made from old bedcovers.’ In 1990 they decided to take paying guests for £120 a night. The castle sleeps 25 comfortably and visitors can shoot and fish. They also open to the public on summer Sundays.

We do a quick tour of the castle, in less than an hour. When David is upstairs and Christine down, she rings him on her portable phone. ‘It caused great problems at the phone shop when I said I needed a model that worked inside six-foot walls.’ They probably receive long-distance bills. We speed through the dining room with its Adamesque wedding cake ceiling, table to seat an army and picture by society portraitist Barbara ‘Basha’ Hamilton. Into the drawing room which had a trampoline in it when David was young, was then turned into a shop selling cashmeres to visiting Americans, and finally decorated in 1985 for a Victor Edelstein charity dress show. Now it has overflowing bowls of hydrangeas, a grand piano and serious curtain poles. Into the library, with books piled high, family photographs and table set for a cosy dinner.

THEN a 10-minute walk to the family wing. ‘For when the revolution comes and 25 other families move in.’ Up to her second, or perhaps third sitting room where currently she’s hanging her ballgowns. ‘That’s a Victor (Edelstein), that’s Catherine (Walker).’ Into David Henry’s room with a bed for their other son Maximillian. ‘Max has his own room as well, but he likes to share.’ Off to Christine’s room with its 18th century Venetian wooden domed bed with silk hangings and cherub. Then along to her partner David’s masculine room with its single bed with two rifles by it and suitcases piled high.

THE HERCULES in which we are arriving in Sarajevo makes a tactical landing, suddenly nose-diving in case there is small arms fire. The Serbs take more pot shots in the afternoon when they’re drunk, but this is early morning. Still, the crew say they can’t underestimate the threat from the ground. I feel frightened because, in contravention of the rules, I don’t have a flak jacket. This is Saturday, the day before this same plane, known to the crew as Fat Albert, is used for Operation Irma.

The homes around the airport have been razed by war and a black cloud of smoke hangs over Mount Igman. Serbs burning villages or villagers making tea, says one of the crew, wryly. The humour of the crew is macabre, like that in an operating theatre, a doctor comments later. The lashing tape is marked in red pen, ‘same shit, different day’. And they have sayings like: ‘You can kick ass or save Sarajevo – but you can’t do both.’ On the ground in Sarajevo, Foreign Legionnaires run around among white UN armoured vehicles. We deliver 26,000 lbs of tinned tuna and flour, with the plane engines still running. They like to get out in three minutes flat. But we’re picking up 30 Canadian soldiers going on rest and recreation leave, so we don’t manage to turn around for a full eight minutes.

The Canadians have been there for three months. What’s it like? Squaddie Guy, 20, smiles and looks puzzled. ‘I hope it’ll never be like that again.’ Tim Gunter is horrified. ‘There are little kids stepping on mines and people skinny and with fear in their eyes.’

Sergeant Renaud Marc asks: ‘Any news on that little girl? Nice of your PM to do that.’

In the body of the aircraft, eight racks for stretchers are pinned at the back, ready for the following day.

Azure lakes, ravines and hills blue in the morning mist of former Yugoslavia stretch beneath us. ‘They should be lying on the beaches bathing,’ says Flight Sergeant Steve Askey, with a bewildered expression. A UN Tornado buzzes underneath us in the opposite direction. ‘Why are the Press all here now?’ asks another crew member ingenuously. ‘Where have you been for the last 15 months?’

Back in Ancona, the doctors and those they teasingly call ‘just nurses’ are preparing themselves. They’re learning useful phrases like ‘are you thirsty or in pain?’ from the Red Cross phrasebook. ‘What’s Serbo-Croat for ‘I want to see a proper doctor?” jests one.

‘How about ‘are you private?’ or ‘I want a second opinion?” ‘Or ‘wait’. After all, they are going to the NHS.’

They are working intensely, lightening their load with humour. You couldn’t meet a nicer, better-meaning bunch. One doctor talks sensitively about the effects on his psyche of dealing with emergency cases. ‘It’s OK while I’m doing the job, because I’m plugged in. But afterwards I can’t sleep for thinking about it.’

They mind about the added load their absence forces on their colleagues at home. And they care deeply about the well-being of those to be evacuated. To many of them, the ages of the evacuees are immaterial: Their health is more important.

They express fear at inadvertently saying to journalists something construed as politically inflammatory. Their leader, Tony Redmond, has worked so hard to achieve these mercy missions and is paranoid about the Press.

By Saturday afternoon, the medical team has been forbidden to speak to journalists. The instruction came from ‘very high up’, they say. Information is scant, but Operation Irma, they think, is becoming very political.

The question of whether Bosnian soldiers are to be evacuated is denied by officials. And the international slanging match about who to evacuate is hotting up between UN officials and cynical politicians keen to score political advantage.

You sense the doctors’ acute awareness of being used as pawns by politicians. They seem to want to mutiny against their enforced silence. You point out that they are only there because of the media and you note grateful recognition and a wish to help on their faces.

They are here simply because they want this to be the start of many humanitarian operations to rescue the sick and injured from a war zone. But they know they are simply putting a plaster on the gaping wound that is the medical problem of Sarajevo.

You find yourself thinking, simplistically, that children deserve priority in evacuations in this increasingly shambolicly organised public relations exercise with a media circus, photo opportunities and allegations of soldiers being rescued.

Now the medical team, which has divided into teams with specific duties, is preparing the field hospital on the civilian and military airbase of Ancona. It is set up in a cargo hangar next to three army tents – one with a Union Jack, one with a French flag and one with a Sky satellite dish. ‘’‘’‘’

There are canteen and toilet facilities and another area for walking wounded. And stretchers, toys, blankets, boiled sweets and fizzy drinks. Huge plastic bags filled with drugs hang on the walls. And hand-coloured nursery pictures of animals – a mouse carrying a breakfast tray on his head reads, ‘a little love makes a lot of difference’.

Information on the number and ages of evacuees and time of airlift changes frequently. As does the appallingly coordinated Ministry of Defence list of journalists allowed to accompany the flight.

I beg a place on a German plane going to Sarajevo, in an effort to see the casualties being loaded. ‘Welkom to zer Germunn airforce,’ they say, beaming. But a little MoD hiccup puts paid to that. So I secure a place on a Canadian flight and maybe it is the Overseas Development Administration which sees an end to that.

At 1.40 local time on Sunday, the tail of the Hercules carrying out Operation Irma opens. Three ambulances, assorted military and a Red Cross representative in fluorescent green jacket stand by. There are 21 people including seven children, plus 16 relatives. Some of the children the RAF team saw as priorities stayed behind.

A doctor stands by the hangar door, keeping telephone contact. The first through the tailgate is chronic meningitis sufferer Belma Salaka, three, with a breathing tube taped to her mouth. Seven people, mostly soldiers, carry her stretcher, careful not to jog her. It was her plight that prompted John Major to demand the number of children on the flight be increased. They bring out nine-month-old Eldar Kalamujic, a nurse shielding his face from the sun. He has liver disease. The TV crews and photographers fight for space, pushing through the restraining rope. The media throng becomes more unmanageable as time goes on and the police offer to make arrests. Now there are some relatives and walking wounded with bandaged eyes – clean but thin. They look tired but relieved. Then a third emaciated boy is carried out. There is 11-year-old Edhen Dedovic, denim-clad, with his right cheekbone eaten away by a mortar wound and his left eye gouged out by shrapnel, walking off, waving delightedly to the crowd.

There are nine on stretchers and walking wounded of military age. One man on a stretcher sticks up his fingers in a Bosnian army victory salute. Curiously there is only one woman, 44-year-old Branka Franic. Then they start to load them on the chartered Russian Tupulev 154 jet, a blue striped plane beneath a blue sky. It made the Red Cross ODA trip to Banja Luka last year.

It is five years old with torn carpets and seats folded down to accommodate stretchers. The doctors dub it a flying intensive care ward, saying its equipment is comparable to a ground hospital.

Professor David Southall, the only consultant paediatrician in the team, said: ‘The mission is orientated to moving children from the war zone. That’s what we’re hoping for if the Bosnian doctors and parents agree. Otherwise they have no hope. They are in a war zone which is getting worse.’

Picture that over-sized meat abattoir, Wembley Arena. People are eating toffee popcorn instead of doing drugs.

White jean-beclad thirtysomethings are sipping beer out of plastic bottles. And nobody is smoking in the no smoking auditorium. The only sniff of something really way out here are the neon exit signs. This is the first night of sex queen Cher’s two-night stand in Wembley. Cher has 15 gold albums, has had 46 top-100 hits, and has received an Academy Award for her performance in Moonstruck.

She also has a tattoo on her left buttock and the sort of figure that could sell a Volvo to a rock star.

The arena is filled with around 8,000 fans. Tame heavy metal guys ‘with long hair and Cher clones on their arms. And corporate businessmen. Waiting for the woman who became a household name a quarter of a century ago and hasn’t been with a man of her own age or older for almost as long. The half Armenian and Cherokee Indian, born Cherilyn Sarkisian, who has recreated herself so many times.

As the star comes in at 9.10, the crowd in the centre of the amphitheatre stands up with screams and claps. Wearing Tina Turner-esque red hair, black thigh-length jacket and black drainpipes, she belts out: ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.’

The woman who sometimes bares her bottom in fishnet stands in an enchanted gothic forest with a wind machine blowing her wig. ‘I’m glad to be back. Who’d have thought I’d have been back and grown lovely red hair?’ says the 46-year-old who has had surgery on her nose and breasts and looks younger every year.

The under-dressed rock siren with the wig stylist reappears for the next item in high black-leather boots, a cobweb body – another minimal creation of costumier Bob Mackie – and black leather jacket to match her now black hair.

Now it’s 9.40 and she’s in sprayed-on lace hot pants and bodice. A handful of people are standing, waggling their bodies and clapping. One Cher clone in a stars and stripes shirt dances, as if to a mirror. Cher and cher alike.

She goes for a break.

Downstairs ‘official franchise vendors’ sell £22 Love Hurts (the name of her current album) tracksuit pants and £4 Cher (in lace camisole) posters. Upstairs the audience is treated to her more celluloid version. Tearful extracts from Mask, then the Witches of Eastwick.

Now she’s in Moonstruck, and a yelp goes up.

She reappears in front of her screen persona in white Snow Queen outfit. Her mostly white audience tap their feet. Minutes later she’s in a harem outfit. The crowd behave like nuns in a brothel.

Madonna or Prince would create an atmosphere. But Cher singing this sort of motorway music to middle-of-the-road types doesn’t even get a traffic jam.

Her fans stand up towards the end. They even clap, the closest she gets to audience participation, when she sings: ‘If I could turn back time’. There are cries, whistles and screams of encore.

But you can count the people who are really jiving on one hand. And they all look like Cher.

The writer Margaret Drabble lives in a Hampstead house and Michael Holroyd, the husband to whom she is devoted, lives in Ladbroke Grove. It is an arrangement that London’s top-drawer literary couple have maintained since their secret wedding in 1982. But now she wants to move in with him. When they entertain, they sleep at her house; when they go to the airport, they spend the night at his. ‘We speak every day,’ says Drabble of Holroyd, the enigmatic man of letters who received a record advance of £625,000 for his biography of George Bernard Shaw. ‘He’s coming to dinner tonight, tomorrow I’ll spend alone…’

Drabble, 53, is an intriguing woman. ‘Occasionally I dream about being naked in the front row of the stalls. Sometimes I’m falling off a cliff or missing an aeroplane,’ she says, cupping her face in her hand. ‘I have a recurrent dream of standing up to give a lecture and I don’t know what I’m talking about.’

She also has a famously frosty relationship with her elder sister, AS Byatt, the Booker prize-winning novelist and critic. There have been periods of potent rivalry when they haven’t spoken, and they refuse to read each other’s books. ‘I was,’ says Drabble, ‘terribly upset when she became very difficult about me.’ Normally exceedingly reluctant to discuss their relationship, she talks later at length about one of the literary world’s most famous tiffs.

Drabble became famous 30 years ago, aged just 23, with A Summer Bird Cage. Once compared to George Eliot, she is currently writing a biography of Angus Wilson, has written novels, screenplays, biographies and edited The Oxford Companion to English Literature. She created a new kind of domestic novel but now writes with ‘black humour about post-industrial society’. Her recent work had critical drubbings. ‘I’ve been around too long and was doing too nicely and they don’t like that.’

She is wearing a sensible black suit, brown shoes and greyish tights and has large penetrating blue eyes, a clear and unmade-up face and brown bob. She is equanimous with an outer confidence, a face that expresses little emotion and a plummy middle-class accent with no trace of her Sheffield roots. We are talking in her Edwardian redbrick house, in a sitting room with one white wall and the rest in 20-year-old William Morris wallpaper, with books everywhere.

We return to the subject of marriage. Drabble and Holroyd spent most of their courtship behind the wheel of a car – Holroyd allegedly teaching her to drive. Why do they have such an unconventional relationship? ‘Both of us absolutely love being alone and we enjoy one another’s company enormously. So we’ve struck up a way of life which allows us to do both. ‘I didn’t want a relationship that was threatening or confining. He didn’t expect me to change or alter my work pattern. So many relationships have a bad effect on both parties. You see them getting nastier or cosier – cosiness is bad, too. For us, every week is different. This week we’re apart two nights. But we can always ring and say, ‘I want to be alone tonight,’ or, ‘Why don’t you come to supper?”

The last of her three children (she has two sons and a daughter) left home last year, so she feels there is no further need for her house. She wants to finish off Angus Wilson and then move into Holroyd’s place next year.

‘We’ll carry on just the same. I absolutely have to have my own space. We’d have to have separate bits of the house. I’ll say things like, ‘I’d like to spend this evening on my own with a whisky and an omelette.’ ‘I think marriage is a dangerous, dangerous relationship, full of potential destruction of personality. People aren’t meant to be together 24 hours a day. The form of relationship we have seems much more natural.’ Are they faithful to each other? ‘It’s not a question that I would talk about,’ she says, sounding strained.

Sex is something that she regards as destructive as well as agreeable. ‘It can be consuming and obsessional and make you very unhappy. I think it’s an extremely important part of life that can cause a great deal of misery. Sexual jealousy is a terrifying feeling. Sex has caused me misery at certain times in my life. I was unnaturally nervous about it when I was young, and then terribly keen to get on with it when I was 18.’

Drabble’s father was a circuit judge who was frequently away and remote, and her mother an English teacher who was aggressive and difficult. The second child of four, she went to a Quaker school in York, read English at Cambridge and got a double first, acted with the RSC for two seasons and then started writing. Marriage to actor Clive Swift lasted 15 years. ‘I was quite fiery and would lose my temper as a child. My mother and father were depressives and we all got depressed. I had quite serious bouts of depression. I used to cry a lot. My mother had a really foul temper and was always telling me off. You just weren’t allowed to make mistakes. She was from a working-class background, so you had to get on in life. ‘I had a most terrible stammer as a child. I could hardly speak. It comes back when I’m tired or cross.’ It also seems to happen when conversation hits an emotional nerve.

So what of her relationship with her sister? ‘She’s written about how she hated me, and I’ve written about how I admired her,’ replies Drabble, her voice rising. ‘When we were little, we had just an ordinary sibling irritation. But things got worse when we became published writers. ‘I used to tag around after Sue (as she calls her) when we were children. I wanted to do everything she wanted to do, which must have been maddening. I published first, when I was very young – which must have been terribly annoying for her.

‘We both became wary of reading one another’s work, worried that we were using the same kind of material. I forced myself to read one volume of her short stories which, unbeknown to me, came up for an award. I found it an unpleasant and disturbing experience reading about my own father.’ How did she feel when AS Byatt won the Booker Prize? ‘I was delighted for her – I don’t let my books go in for it, but of course I felt a twinge of envy…

‘We get on much better now than we did. She had this tragic period in her life after her son was killed. But now for the first time in many years she’s actually enjoying life.’

What about the time when they refused to speak? ‘It wasn’t as obvious as that,’ she stammers. ‘We just didn’t go out of our way to see each other.’ Does she feel animosity towards her? ‘No. I feel flattered and honoured if she calls me. I’m still the little sister. I feel it is wrong to bother her. I’m actually quite frightened of her because she is older and cleverer than me.’

As Byatt is certainly older; but Drabble is extremely clever. She also appears dour, but laughs. And wise, enquiring, sometimes priggish but likable. ‘I suffer from doubt most of the time. Doubt of myself as a writer, cook, housewife and human being,’ she says, steadily. ‘I feel flawed and faulty as a human being.’

Cameras flash and the fashion world applauds while eating cheese straws and drinking Lanson champagne. These are the British Fashion Awards – the Oscars of the designer rag trade.

It is all taking place in the tented world of the Duke of York’s barracks. The audience wears black and glitter and off-the-shoulder creations and looks as if it could swap places with the catwalk folk. And then there are the proper models, the 34-22-34 ones who say they won’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 and earn up to £1,000 a minute, eclipsing their designer bosses. Naomi Campbell, Helena Christiansen, Tatjana Patiz and Linda Evangelista to be precise. This evening they appear swan-like, sometimes carrying poodles. Without them, any show would lack lustre.

At 10.30 the master of ceremonies announces: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please stand.’ Is this for Naomi, the woman they say expects to be treated like royalty? No . . . it’s Princess Michael of Kent, wearing a glamorous nun’s habit of non-English design.

Vivienne Westwood has won the British Designer of the Year title for the second year running. ‘I want to say thank you to these models, who are worth every penny,’ she says.

The women with pouting lips are seated. Their fees have quadrupled in as many years and they expect to be flown first-class while sales of clothes are falling in these recession-hit times.

Is it true models don’t speak, have no way of projecting their personalities and push lettuce leaves around their plates? And will Helena Christiansen demand a smorgasbord?

A cassoulet of wild mushrooms and asparagus appears. Linda Evangelista, with pimento hair, lights up a Marlboro. And the divine Vivienne Westwood, in a dress printed with Fragonard cherubs, tells me the girls are super. ‘Naomi is charming,’ she says. ‘They’re all professionals, always on time, not prima donnas. They’ve got a marvellous theatrical sense. It costs £5,000 to advertise in a glossy magazine, but with a show you get all this free publicity. When I saw Linda wearing my pink, my heart was beating. To see your clothes on this dream, this dishiest of dishes . . . but if I saw any of them in jeans, I wouldn’t think them that great.’

Princess Michael holds court, later on little clusters of beau monde gather around her. Many of the models weren’t keen on meeting the Royal. ‘Just not interested. They wanted to go back to their hotel,’ said one of their entourage.

Boy George whirls around. His comment? ‘Beauty fades, but talent lives on.’

I meet a supermodel in a Rifat dress. Naomi Campbell, serene and incandescently beautiful, is enjoying a successful evening and a cigarette. Nearby Linda Evangelista looks bored. She smokes cigarettes. When you look like that, you don’t have to do anything. She thaws. ‘I came as a favour for British Vogue and to support British designers. My services were free,’ she tells me. ‘”And what is she wearing? She gives the frostiest of frosty looks. ‘Armani’.

It’s 12.30. People are starting to leave. — And, suddenly, the supermodels have gone. Do they need beauty sleep?

Next to the ‘door bell is a sticker bearing the legend: ‘Make his day. Break in.’ On it is a picture of a pit bull terrier, stocky and muscular with a steel-trap jaw.

So why would anyone want an American pit bull terrier-or APBT, as the new Sporting Dog periodical would have it?

There are an estimated 10,000 APBTs in England, of whom 1000 reside in Dave and Maria Britons’ borough of Waltham Forest, an area where youths walk in the park: one with an APBT, another with a rottweiler. With its killer instinct, the APBT is a loaded weapon.

Dave and Maria, 36 and 35, live in a terrace house in Walthamstow on a short stretch of road that houses no less than one dobermann, a Yorkshire terrier and 13 APBTs. Of these, 11, including nine puppies, are in the Britons’ 20-ish ft paved garden.

They have a one-bedroom flat on a heavy traffic road. They have lived in it for two years-with exposed plaster work and unfinished floor in the microwave-only kitchen. There’s a picture in the hall of a hand carrying a spearhead, blood trickling down-and in the sitting room, ones of fierce-looking tigers’ heads. In the bathroom, the Sunday article is open at The Hiss of Death. There is an uncomfortable atmosphere of violence restrained.

The dogs, Nash and Misty, don’t even bark when we arrive. They wag their tails. They show no sign of aggression. In fact, they are rather placid. And in the garden the five-week-old puppies frolic, squealing and squeaking. One chews my foot, another my handbag.

‘The vet’s always saying how gentle they are,’ says Maria, in black leggings, wine T-shirt and long brown hair. She has a face that looks as if it has experienced the rougher side of life and a character that fluctuates between being meek and showing a very hard edge. ‘It’s sad people are so nasty about them. They’re such lovable things,’ she says, passing them a tray of rice, egg and biscuit.

Maria is a housewife who says she doesn’t do a lot. Like her husband, she left school at 16. ‘I generally take the dogs out for a couple of hours a day.’ She says she only bred so her bitch would put on weight. But she hopes to sell them for upwards of £300 each.

‘They’re good with everyone, particularly children, very good guards, obedient, very affectionate,’ says Dave, showing me bookplates of one with a parrot and one pulling a baby in a cart.

He’s rough-spoken, bullish and thickset, wearing a tracksuit that he has worn to mend a friend’s car, and long hair. He’s clearly very strong. ‘Currently unemployed, and looking for business premises,’ he says, adding that he’s a motor mechanic when ‘working. They live on the dole, claiming (between them) £124 every two weeks.

They don’t have any children. ‘I have no intention of having any, either,’ says Maria. ‘The dogs are my kids.’ He, too, is mad on the creatures. Ask him to describe his lifestyle, and he says: ‘My dogs . . . when I get home I’ll walk them or play with them in the yard.’ He goes to the club for APBTs and other sporting dogs which started in Basildon six weeks ago. Operating alternate Thursdays, it offers events like ‘flirt pole variations’ and ‘weight pulling’-in which a 70 lb dog pulled 5151 lb harnessed to it. They sell T-shirts which read PITBULL, where P is for protective, I for intelligent, then tasteful, boisterous, unspoilt, loving and lively.

When Dave’s ‘not with the dogs, he’ll ‘shoot off to see some mates or go down the betting shop’. He’ll bet on anything, he laughs-except dog fighting. Nor would he fight his dogs. ‘If they get hurt, I get hurt.’ He says they’re part of the family.

‘My dogs have never bitten anyone and they’re never likely to. Only about .001 per cent of the 9000 registered dogs have ever attacked people. And a dog will only attack if it feels threatened, annoyed, protecting its own territory or jealous.’

But what about the case of the mutilated six-year-old, Rucksana Khan? ‘Sad,’ says Maria.

‘But we don’t know the full circumstances,’ says Dave. ‘You never hear both sides of the story as to why the dog attacked.’

Maria thinks it’s untenable that the RSPCA should suggest treating the animals in law as wild. ‘It’s disgusting because they are our pets!’ And what do they think of the MP’s suggestion that the dogs should be neutered and imports banned? ‘Well,’ says Dave, ‘I think MPs should be neutered.’

Originally the Britons had a German shepherd-which didn’t stop them being burgled. So two years ago they decided on an APBT. ‘We’re living in a high risk area with lots of muggings. When my wife goes out in the evening with her friends, I don’t want her walking around the streets with nothing on her arm.’

When he goes walking, he carries a breaking stick-a long piece of wood ‘with which I can open their jaws in a flash’. So there must be just a hint of a thought in his head that the dogs could attack? ‘Oh no, no, no. It’s just a precaution we take.’ And one that he’s been taking for the last two years. As he says, these dogs do have five times more power in their jaws than rottweilers.

Dave decided to let his dog breed. ‘So it doesn’t get possessive about its owners. A nasty streak can come out in them otherwise. If a dog hasn’t had a litter, it’ll show a lot more aggression to people,’ he says, letting his bull defence down for a minute.

He shows me their leather harnesses. ‘No princess, no darling,’ says Maria, as she picks up the brass-decorated leather, £35. ‘You can get them with spikes all over. And you can pick the dog up with it,’ he says, lifting the creature in the air.

He also has a leather arm protector. ‘To play with them.’ Like a piece of leather armour, it also has sackcloth over the hand (£120). And then there’s the treadmill (£250), which is like something for a giant hamster. ‘For walking the dogs when it’s raining. They love it.’

Once he had a visit from the council’s animal wardens. ‘They said they’d seen us hanging the dogs from the first-floor window. I thought: ‘That’s a bit strange since we live on the ground floor!’ The thing is, the dog was tugging on a piece of rope-and all they could see was the top of the head and a rope.’

And has he ever been in fights? ‘Years ago.’ His voice goes quiet. ‘Three or four years ago.’ That was when he worked as a doorman in clubs. He did that after he ran a security service company.

And has he ever been the wrong side of the law? He’s standing up now, towering above my seated position. ‘Er, yes.’ For what? ‘Well, if you read a book by James Campbell there’s a chapter in there called The Professional-concerning a robbery case I was involved in. I got eight-and-a-half years. That was in 1978 when I was 23. I was tying up the chairman of the Walthamstow Building Society and took some jewels that were given to him by Mountbatten. I lost all my remission.

‘But that’s years ago. I’m not anti-police. The police have got a job to do. I’ve had no trouble from the police concerning my dogs.’