Crufts winners Kaiser and Joanne Day has been showing our video team just how they managed to win the Friends for Life award at the world-famous show.

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Joanne Day and her dog Kaiser won the Crufts’ Friends for Life Award this month. Now, normal life is resumed

After the glamour of success at the world’s biggest dog show, a trip to the supermarket.

But it’s not quite the display of “normal” life you might expect, judging by the reaction of the check-out girl who can barely believe what she is seeing.

A dog – that’s right, a dog – has just jumped up and handed her a credit card to pay for the shopping.

“Isn’t it incredible? It’s the first time he’s done it. I was shocked because he had not really practised at all,” says the “superstar” dog’s owner, Joanne Day, back at her home near the east Shropshire border at Weston-under-Lizard.

Kaiser the golden doodle is one in a million; Joanne’s first dog has nothing short of given her life back.

Brave Joanne, 36, suffers with dystonia, a rare condition with no known cure which causes muscle contractions to strike all over the body and which forces her to stand on one leg.

Previously dubbed “the Flamingo Lady” she has suffered agonising contortions since a rollerskating accident as a teenager.

But Joanne’s life began to take a dramatic turn for the better after assistance dog Kaiser, from Shropshire-based Canine Partners, came into her life last year.

“My mum kept saying I needed help but I said I ‘No, can do everything on my own’. But I’d always wanted a dog and I went to an exhibition at the NEC in Birmingham and there were lots of dogs doing amazing things like picking up crutches and getting things out of washing machines.

“At the time I was getting quite lonely and I did not know if I could cope.”

Another stumbling block – ironically, given how much Kaiser has changed her life – was the fact that Joanne is allergic to dogs. Fortunately with the pooch she fell in love with, she had no adverse reaction.

Today the pair are inseparable, and it’s quite incredible to see them working together. Kaiser carries the washing basket from the bathroom into the kitchen and unloads it into the washer.

“And at the end of the wash he gets it out and gives it to me to put into the dryer,” says Joanne, “but we are training him to do that as well.”

“And when my crutches fall on the floor he picks them up and gives them to me. He opens the fridge and takes a can out and gives it to me and he opens drawers.

“He can help me take my jacket off and trousers off, I just give him a sleeve and he takes it with his teeth. He’s even taken tights off and not put a hole in them! He’s absolutely incredible, he’s changed my life.”

Joanne pretends to sneeze. Kaiser, snoozing in his bed, immediately looks up at her before hunting down and bringing her a box of tissues

When the phone rings, Kaiser picks up the handset and passes it to Joanne.

“And if I fall over, he allows me to lean on him to get back up. And he can bark on command if I need any help from someone else.

“It’s like having a brilliant ray of light enter your life.

As Joanne says earlier, before her dog came along she had been getting lonely and often opted to stay at home rather than venture out.

“I’ve got a lot of new friends because of walking Kaiser,” she says.

Now she is facing surgery to release the leg and prevent her condition from spreading.

“It’s a big gamble because it could make it worse. It could move somewhere else, to my back, and leave me in a mess or bed-bound.

“It’s a horrible disorder, but I wouldn’t get through surgery without him,” she adds smiling at her best friend.

It’s a two-way street, too, When Joanne recently went into hospital for a lumpectomy, Kaiser lay by the front door the whole time, waiting for her to return.

After her success at Crufts, Joanne says: “It’s nice to get back into a routine, so he knows where he is. He had two days off after the show, where I just don’t ask him to do things, and it kind of left me back where I was before I had him!”

She recalls some of the frustrations while training Kaiser, times when there seemed to be no break-through.

“He was quite stubborn and I would say to my mum ‘I’m frustrated with him’ and she’d say ‘That’s what 36 years of living with you was like,” jokes Joanne.

On her fireplace are cards from well-wishers and the trophy she and Kaiser won at Crufts.

Joanne will never forget the success of the year she went from “existing to living again”, and says the fact that the Friends for Life award was voted for by members of the public makes it all the more special.

What she hopes for most of all from all this, however, is that more people become aware of the difference assistance dogs can make to people’s lives.

“I’m proud to be an ambassador for Canine Partners because I wouldn’t be sitting here doing this without them,” she says.

But already she is moving on, into an ever-brighter future. Because perhaps the biggest show ring is, in fact, normal life.

Joanne looks back to this time last year and says: “I had lost a lot of self confidence, I didn’t believe in myself.

“Kaiser is everything to me, he has made me whole again.”

By Ben Bentley