"He's showing classic signs of repression," said gay friend Tim, who was trying to persuade me to accompany him and his hounds on a walk.

He'd left the dogs - all owned by Tim's various clients, who employed him in his relatively new capacity of professional dog walker - in his van and was absent-mindedly flicking through the TV channels while I tried to ignore the television and get on with article about American crime writer James Patterson.

The 'he' he was referring to was David Beckham, who was on some children's programme talking about football, Brooklyn and the lovely Victoria and the classic signs of repression referred to Beckham's imagined (in Tim's mind) homosexuality.

And before anyone reaches for a Jason Donovan-style lawsuit, I'm not suggesting for a moment that David Beckham is anything other than a testosterone-filled, red-blooded, son-squiring, heterosexual male.

He's just the latest in a long line of people (Bill Clinton, Brad Pitt, Ewan McGregor, Will Young - okay so he may have had a point in the early stages of Pop Idol) who, fancying them himself but knowing he doesn't stand a chance, Tim chooses to believe would be shacked up with him, were it not for the fact that they were in denial.

"Just look at the way he minced on to the set," said Tim, desperately trying to prove his point.

"He has a broken foot," I reminded him. "I think you'll find he was limping."

"Well, if you ask me, that's just a convenient cover story," said Tim. "Anyway, are you coming on this walk or not?"

As the piece about James Patterson was not progressing particularly well (I'd written JAMES PATTERSON in courier script size 12 but not got much further), I agreed to go for a quick stroll on Ditchling Beacon, provided the dogs he had with him were not as aggressive as the ones I agreed to help walk last week.

The latter had got into a fight with a poor defenceless, though remarkably vocal, Jack Russell from which we'd been trying to extricate them when my first important work call of the day came through on my mobile.

"It's all right," said Tim, opening the door of the van to reveal two aggressive looking Dobermans. "They're gay dogs."

"You mean their owners are gay?" I queried.

"No, the dogs," said Tim, as the dogs snarled in a way that suggested they thought they were being slandered.

"Showing classic signs of repression of course, but underneath that snarling exterior, they're a pair of queens."

Tim went on to tell me about a TV programme he'd seen, presented by a gay comedian who argued that much of the animal kingdom was gay but their mating rituals had been misinterpreted by a largely heterosexual natural history community, intent on preserving the argument that being gay was unnatural.

As if to prove his point, we arrived at Ditchling Beacon to be greeted by a couple of doe-eyed greyhound bitches who were sniffing around the grass and who the gay Dobermans ignored completely in favour of sniffing each other.

"I know," I said, trying to pre-empt any obscene comment Tim was about to make. "The girls were asking for it but they're simply not interested?"

"What those dozy greyhounds?" queried Tim. "They weren't asking for it. They're quite obviously lesbians ... "