All I want for Christmas is 900 more years, Methuselah years, so I could have all the dogs of my dreams, (one at a time, I’ve never been an enthusiast of the double pick-up).
 
Life is so unfair.
 
I want a Samoyed for my Alaska homesteader fantasy, an Irish setter for hiking the moors in Ireland, a borzoi next to me by the fireplace as I polish my Fabergé eggs.
 
Gimme a pack of foxhounds for hunting alongside the Prince of Wales in the English country side, a Grand Basset Griffon Vendeen to track wild boar in Normandy, a burly Akita bodyguard while I roam the neon-lit streets of Tokyo barhopping with Bill Murray.
 
Nine hundred years, that's all I want for Christmas.
 
But alas, the days of man are but three-score-and-ten, four-score if you wash behind your ears. Not enough; I need ninety just to cover the previous paragraphs.
 
And that's without even including my terrier dream team; the pure white Smooth Fox terrier strutting by my side on a Sunday afternoon promenade through Central Park, the Kerry Blue ferreting out ornery varmints while we explore the craggy coastline of Iceland in search of wild auk eggs - (I love poached wild auk eggs and bacon on matzoh) - and there's Nigel the Norfolk terrier snoring on my lap at tea-time with my Oxford chums at Brideshead.
 
I’m up to 135 years already without even counting the jowly droolers like the bloodhound, the bulldog, and my Uncle Beryl the beekeeper.

The diversity as dogs is a marvel of human husbandry, one that pales only to evolution as far as I'm concerned. It's captured my imagination all my life, it beckons me to plod onward ho, it maketh me pine to frolic naked through a field of alfalfa.
 
Give me 900 years - that's all I say, 900 years - that's all I want, 900 years.