I am learning, or I have been told to learn, not to scream dementedly when she eats the cover off a leather sofa and redistributes the foam stuffing around the lounge room.

Likewise, a cooler reaction should have been the response when she ate the back off my new Thomas Cook boots.

Lecturing her loudly on the unacceptability of chewing the leather spine off a pair of 1885 Atlases of Australasia, was also – I am told – not the WTG – Way To Go.

It does very little, I am informed, to screech obscenities out the back door in the dead of night when (for the 10th time in three hours) she moves to Corgi Defcon 5 and starts barking maniacally at the moon.

The same reactions as those above are also not productive when (and I swear I’m not making this stuff up):

The crotch is chewed out of the fourth pair of jocks in a week.

Mrs Whack’s great-grandmother’s lovely old cedar chaise longue has all the braid ripped off it.

The same redecoration is performed on a 130-year-old upright armchair.

The same with the dining chairs.

One handle of the “good” wheelbarrow gets shorted by five centimetres.

The handsome patch of artificial turf mysteriously goes walkies all by itself.

About half of my prized volume of Escher drawings disappears, so suddenly the mystery ever upwards staircases don’t work.

The lace curtains down the corridor develop a sudden sagginess, followed by a sudden “holiness” with the holes oddly corgi-sized.

The old deaf dog finally refuses to come out of her kennel because she’s worn out by being chewed on the face by the bouncing corgi.

The “indestructible” dog chew toys last 37.6 seconds.

The two-leg residents have to take to wearing slippers to avoid that shocking sensation of dog poo squishing through your toes in the dead of night.

The corgi snoring keeps us awake when we get so tired of her nonsense we think it might just work if we let her sleep in the bedroom.

The corgi and the jelly-belly fat cat have a pact to play nuclear-powered chasey games around the house at 7pm every day.

No, getting loud and sweaty is not the correct response, I am told. 

It is better to be calm, just turn a cold shoulder and show disdain for such idiocy, while maintaining a firm and controlled dialogue.

I am told that when if hurl fury at Marley, she nearly always looks surprised and turns to look behind her, as if to say: “Well, that’s certainly no way to talk to the cat.”

And I am prepared to believe that’s correct.

And it’s for this reason, dear reader, that I have come to the point of this column.

We should let Vlad the Inhaler Putin come to Australia as part of the G20 conference of world leaders in Brisbane in November.

Clearly, he’ll keep crapping on the carpet and invading neighbouring countries if we keep yelling at him.

Marvellous what a corgi can teach you, isn’t it?