Leonbergers are obsessed with water: they jump in

Leonbergers are obsessed with water: they jump in."Labradors and retrievers - and a cross between the two - are still regarded as the ideal guide dog (1,200 are bred by the charity each year with 4,500 working on the street) but some blind people have been calling for more individual companions.Leonbergers are being allocated to tall men who want a big, unusual dog and do not mind chatting about it to the public. But they are wary of breeding them until a type has a proven track record. In the past, a dalmatian was successfully trained, though the breed is regarded as rather boisterous."We haven't eliminated anything. We wander round Cruft's and say, 'Maybe we should give that a go'," said Neil Ewart, Breeding Centre manager, who is in charge of choosing suitable dogs "Some day we might discover another perfect breed. It does us all good to see something different like the Leonberger occasionally They are huge. The poodle is proving an ideal dog for people with asthma or allergies to dog hair because it does not moult. But owners have special instructions to take the dogs for a regular haircut."They don't have poodle show cuts.

But the people who take them have to go to the poodle parlour regularly and get the dogs clipped," said a senior guide-dog trainer.Senior staff from the charity have surreptitiously been scouting round Cruft's dog show for talented animals they can take on as puppies or young adults. IT WEIGHS 10 stone, looks like a lion and can knock down a man with a friendly pounce. Yet the Leonberger, a German watchdog crossed from a St Bernard and a Newfoundland, may be the guide dog of the 21st century. The dog, which was bred to pull carts and drag drowning people from water, is being put through its paces by the charity, Guide Dogs for the Blind.It is one of several unusual breeds - including poodles and Bernese mountain dogs - being trained by the organisation to add to its standard supply of labradors and retrievers.The charity is putting several unorthodox breeds to the test in the hope of spotting undiscovered talent - and giving blind people more variety in the dogs they choose.Australian shepherds, Bouvier des Flandres, boxers and even rottweilers have taken part in the organisation's rigorous educational programme.Several have qualified in the past year, including a number of standard poodles - and several more are due to start training soon. "Of course, I didn't know the sexual characteristics of most of them."He submitted the stories to publishers anonymously.

When they were repeatedly rejected, Wesker posed as the translator of a newly-found foreign text."Our writer seems to be exploring the possibility that passion excites the more when set against intellect," he wrote in a bogus translator's note.Wesker believes the first story, which tells of the tender deflowering of the youngest daughter, should be taught in sex education classes at school."When you think how some women suffer with their first sexual experience at the hands of insensitive men, this could only be helpful," he said.The work was published only after Wesker put his name to it. Piers Blofeld, editor at Quartet, said: "We felt that a man of his stature should be published." It was "hard to say" if the stories would have been published if they had been written by someone else."One would also hope there is a commercial appeal there," added Mr Blofeld.. The playwright then wrote One More Ride on the Merry-Go-Round and Lady Othello. "I came across the Grimm's tale and decided to base each daughter on women I knew of, in so far as they were different physical types," he said.

And there is also the appeal of surprising people."The tales included in The King's Daughters were begun in 1980, after Margaret Drabble told Wesker he never seemed to write about sex. Then she parted them..." or "She felt the crackle of paws among the last dead winter leaves, felt the hot breath between her thighs".The author said: "I know people will say, what on earth is this serious writer doing writing erotica? But although it is a serious piece of work, the stories are slightly tongue-in-cheek. Where Anglo-Saxon is avoided, he uses phrases, such as "Ease in your fiery lance".Action sequences read, "Now the gypsy positioned herself most curiously First she raised Dionis to her knees. Arnold Wesker, who became a leading playwright in the Sixties and Seventies, with gritty successes such as Chips with Everything and The Wesker Trilogy, has penned a series of sexual fantasies featuring bestiality, voyeurism and bondage. The stories, which had trouble finding a publisher, are sourced on the Brothers Grimm's classic fairytale, The King's Daughters. At the end of this month Quartet will launch Wesker's erotic collection under the same title.In the Grimm version, the king's 12 daughters leave the palace at night seeking adventures. In Wesker's reworking, each daughter encounters an intense sexual awakening, frequently involving other women, gnomes, dogs or flagellation and, for one, all four.

No encounter involves conventional romantic love.Last night Wesker, whose early work gave birth to the term "kitchen- sink drama", strenuously defended himself against the label of pornographer and said he wrote the stories because he wanted to see if literary language could be used to arouse readers without recourse to crude terminology."I worked very hard to find other ways of describing the sex act," said Wesker, 66.But the vocabulary of many of the stories is nothing if not blunt. Not only have musicals been significant in the history of the theatre, they have been significant in the history of the National."THE TOP TEN1 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 2 Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller 3 A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams 4 Look Back in Anger John Osborne 5 Long Day's Journey into Night Eugene O'Neill 6 The Crucible Arthur Miller 7= Private Lives Noel Coward / Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead Tom Stoppard 9= Angels in America Tony Kushner/ The Caretaker Harold Pinter. ONE OF the original Angry Young Men of British theatre is about to astonish the literary establishment by publishing a collection of 12 highly explicit, erotic tales. "The big musicals have been seen by more people in the 20th century than most plays," he said "So when they use the word 'significant', I would ask significant to whom? Don't the general public count?"And West End producer Bill Kenwright said: "It's madness. Jude Kelly, director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse puts Pinter's The Birthday Party at number one.Also proving controversial is the decision by the National not to include any musicals, saying the project is about the written word - even though musicals such as Oklahoma, Guys And Dolls and Carousel have been among the National's most popular productions.That decision has astonished theatre impresarios among them Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Jenny Topper, artistic director of the Hampstead Theatre has Waiting For Godot in second place with Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests first.