Dog swallows couple's pension cash

When an Aldwick couple went to collect their pension, they didn't bank on it turning into a dog's dinner. After Mike and June Hopkins' dog Macan accidentally snaffled £120-worth of £20 notes and vomited it up later, Mr Hopkins decided that with a recession on, every penny certainly counts and spent the rest of his weekend piecing together hundreds of tiny pieces of money. After donning a pair of Marigolds, Mr Hopkins sorted through the sick and dog mess to retrieve all the fragments and then used sterilising solution to clean them and a pair of tweezers to painstakingly piece each note back together.

After a six-hour mission, Mr Hopkins managed to complete the jigsaw with a difference and presented 90 per cent of the notes intact to his branch of Barclays in Rose Green, where the staff happily swapped them for some crisp, clean notes, to much laughter and smiles. Mr Hopkins, who is 'not squeamish', said the episode had caused a lot of amusement with friends and family. "My daughter's partner was sitting in the chair when he spotted the dog had been sick. He said 'it looks like money' and I couldn't believe it. I managed to pick out four notes by counting the heads.



"I put these together and there were others so I thought there could well be more. In the morning I scoured the garden for signs of his do and found entwined remains of more torn pieces. I washed all the pieces out and laid them on paper. I started with the heads first and if I couldn't match one piece, I moved on to another. The people at the bank were laughing their heads off. The woman said all the serial numbers were showing and they were recognisable, but I didn't have the nerve to tell them the whole story." Macan, a five-year-old Bedlington terrier-cross, has displayed a taste for serviettes and tissues in the past and will often take things back to his bed.

"He's normally a good dog, the other dog I have is quite naughty, but Macan's good," said Mr Hopkins. "I take him out and we do field sports and he's quite well-behaved. We think the wallet fell on the bedroom floor the previous evening because my wife remembered she had found it – she hadn't thought anything of it before." Mr Hopkins, of Sefton Avenue, has had a good laugh about it and has now vowed to keep his wallet on a higher shelf in future. "I have a new motto – pick it up or it could cost you your pension," he said.