Now, Oscar has never liked travelling in cars. Just getting him to approach our big car and jump in to pass his Silver Good Citizen test took several weeks of stressful training and Polish sausage rubbed under my fingernails on the night. This is a pity because I’ve always relished the image of him disdaining passers-by, haughty and proud next to me in the passenger seat of my Smart car. Instead, he curls up cowering and whimpering on the seat. Sad when your kids fail to live up to your dreams.

Yesterday I had to take him to see the consultant ophthalmologist at the Vet Specialist Hospital in the middle of Wanchai. I worried for weeks about how I was going to get him there. The first option, muzzled on the ferry and then taking our chance with a taxi, seemed stress-generating, so we decided that I’d take a taxi all the way from our urban taxi rank about 2kms’ walk away in North Plaza.

I don’t often walk Oscar now and it was nice to have him trotting beside me, unmuzzled for a change because it’s almost deserted at the moment, as the schools are closed and people are being told to avoid going out. I sat down in the taxi, first making sure that it was OK to get in with my companion the size of a small pony. I thought it was going to be difficult to get Oscar in but, after some initial hesitation, he popped himself into the footwell next to me and looked out of the window all the way over the bridges, through the tunnels over to Kowloon side and then back again to the Island, until we reached the hospital, where lots of people liked him enough to take his picture.

I was dreading that the ophthalmologist would find tumours but it turned out that the longstanding shadows in his right eye were cysts that developed before he was born and have worked their way onto his cornea. His inability to contract or dilate his pupils is due to age-related degeneration and nothing at all to worry about. What a relief!

As we waited on the pavement on the other side of the road in the middle of still bustling, though universally masked Hong Kong, Oscar sat quietly taking it all in like the Good Boy that he is. In the return taxi, he’d even worked out that he could steady himself by leaning his paw against the seat, which just proves that you can teach an old dog new tricks. Now we just need to teach him to walk in 10cm stilettos and he’ll be a proper car to bar dog.

And so as not to leave our elderly beagle out of this, we’ve managed to teach him to work for his food too: