When a toast is raised at a wedding, it is invariably to the bride. Not so when artist and author Sally Muir married the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft back in 1990. That honour went to Fanny, Sally Muir’s “big-haired, lawless 80s mongrel” with whom she had fallen in love at first sighting in Battersea Dogs Home when she was 24 years old.
“Fanny was toasted as the person who brought us together,” laughs Muir, talking to me on Zoom from her studio at her Bath home, her grey whippet, Peggy, curled up in an old leather armchair behind her. “Geoffrey was mad about her.” And if he hadn’t been, would it have been a deal-breaker? The answer, after a moment’s delay is, of course, yes – her hesitation attributable to her comic timing, inherited, perhaps, from her late father, the comedy writer Frank Muir.
