I hope you all had a good Christmas and Rudolph and his friends delivered the goods as requested.

I was fortunate to have my family in Brighton with me, rather than having to travel up to London to be with them.

The family gathering included one of the most important members of the London household, one Freebie the dog.

She is a rather solid Staffordshire Bull cross and lives in a large flat where she has carpet on every floor surface.

My wooden open plan staircase provides her with an exciting adventure trail when she visits, in spite of our efforts to dissuade her from exploring the upper echelons of my house.

This time, too full no doubt of the spirit of Christmas or possibly in search of her Christmas stocking, she misjudged her next step on the uncovered stair and ended up in a most unbecoming position for a somewhat elderly lady.

She was swiftly gathered to the bosom of her adoring family, nearly giving my son-in-law a hernia on the way, but when we found that the application of Doggy Choc Drops and other soothing delights did not improve matters we realised it was definitely a job for the nearest vet as she simply could not put one leg to the ground.

As I don't have any pets my knowledge of the local vet scene is minimal, so a trawl through the local directory yielded some names.

We picked the nearest, only to be greeted with a courteous message to try another number belonging to a vet on emergency duty.

This turned out to be in Kemp Town and a charming young lady offered us a choice of times to visit, along with full instructions on how to find the surgery.

It was pouring with rain as we wrapped the precious cargo up warmly and drove her to meet her fate. We were worried that if the leg turned out to be broken she might have to be put down as, at her age, the chances of recovery were not likely to be good.

The vet was very kind and reassuring and promised to do his best to help what was so obviously a much loved pet.

We left her to have an x-ray and a light anaesthetic and went home hoping all would be well.

When the vet phoned later for us to go and pick Freebie up he was encouraging, saying she had not broken anything but had strained the leg badly and needed to rest it and take painkillers for a couple of days.

As you can imagine there was almost as much rejoicing as if we had won the lottery.

A bit later we wished we had won the lottery when it came to paying the bill!

But when you realise this was holiday time, and Freebie had had the best possible attention, no lying on a cold trolley in the corridor for her, we did not begrudge a single penny. In fact we were profoundly grateful it had not been one of us who had had the accident!

We were very impressed with the way the whole thing had been dealt with and glad to have our special family member back with us, a bit bruised but on the whole in pretty good nick.

She is now taking a few phone calls to enquire after her health, but we hope she will resist the temptation to go ski jumping (sorry, that should read 'stair jumping') when she next visits Brighton, even though I am sure she would like to meet her nice vet again.