My parents have a dog. He's a cocker spaniel. A rather sullen brute, in my view, but maybe that's just with me. There may be some confusion over status. Frankly, I'm not sure he realises he's a dog. Certainly, other dogs hold no interest. “So?” he seems to say, should one sniff his backside. “It's a dog. And? What of it?”

One memorable exception was when he met my friend Alex's dog, who is one of those sex-pest dogs. You know the ones? The pair of them, both male, spent a happy afternoon rubbing and shunting in the garden. Afterwards, our spaniel sat under the kitchen table and appeared to be having a long think.

Or so I chose to believe. Honestly, has there ever been a greater, more wilful delusion than the one that Man has indulged in over Dog? I know there will be letters and, God help me, photographs, but this must be said. Dogs are stupid, and they want our food. This may be manifest in a variety of diverse and charming ways, but it is also all that is going on between their ears. Only a person can have a personality. Your dog just has an appetite and an easy life.

You will have read about Bernann McKinney, the woman who may or may not be a 1970s Mormon-snatching glamour model, but definitely has had five clones of her dead pit bull terrier (Booger) made for £25,000 in South Korea. It is a lot of money to pay, just to be lied to in a particular, stupid way. I've been trying to figure out why it makes me so angry.

My second favourite dog story this August (and hurrah, for we are only a week in) is the one about Hector, the Great Dane who swallowed a 2ft stick. That is to say, three foot of dog, two foot of stick. It prompted me to look up another similar story, from a few years ago. That one was about Jake, a 12in puppy who swallowed a 7in knife. His owner took him to the vet because the dog couldn't bend. Dogs are morons. If they weren't Man's best friend, they'd be extinct.

So I am angry, I think, because I am ashamed. If dogs weren't morons, they'd be laughing at us. I think of the wise words of Homer Simpson, campaigning for political office in Springfield. “Animals are crapping in our houses! And we're picking it up! Did we lose a war?”

Doppelgänger

Speaking of clones, won't it be fun when cloned passports are as common as cloned credit cards? Only last week, my Visa bill informed me that I had recently eaten dim sum in Essex. Nice to see I'm getting around.

I once had a passport stolen. It left my bag in a small town near Calcutta, which I cannot find on Google but maintain was called Anusol. Since then, in an irresponsible sort of a way, I have always quite liked the romance of having another version of myself kicking about out there. At times I have thought of blaming things on him, such as my first three failed driving tests, or my student loan. One of these days, I suppose he'll take out a mortgage, or get a job on The Daily Telegraph. That'll teach me.

Virtuous cycle

I have a new favourite thing. On a sticky day in Paris, and with a couple of hours to kill before my train, I hired myself a vélib'. These are the newish public bicycles they have on racks dotted around the city. It costs virtually nothing. Whack in your details, pick a bike and you are off, down cobbled lanes and men actually playing accordions. For an hour, I looped around between Notre Dame and the Louvre, earning my own breeze and what I chose to interpret as glares of envy from yappy little Parisian dogs, all yapped out in the heat.

Similar schemes in the UK have usually failed, swiftly, because of theft. Paris appears to have stopped this problem from becoming endemic, mainly because if bicycle theft is your thing, you could do a lot better. Indeed, you would struggle to do worse. These are heavy, clumsy, ungainly things. The gears are flighty, the brakes nonchalant. They are perfectly designed to be what they are, which is a simple unexciting way of getting from A to B.

The only problem, as far as I could make out, is that an awful lot of people seem to want to go there, too, which can make it hard to find space to dump your bike. So you have to set off to C, or maybe D, to look for an empty berth. And after that, you have to get back. But how?

Going for a Burton

Thank you, finally, for your many, many e-mails regarding last week's item about pitches for Miliband-themed movies. The best was a heartwarming tale about an awkward robot boy trying to win the love of normal humans. If we can get Tim Burton on board, I really think Edward Milihands could be a winner.

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