Ted Walsh's reference to his great Butterfly as "a quiet oul' Christian" re minded me that the late Ned Cash once described a child's pony he wanted to sell me as "an absolute Christian gentleman". I have often heard horsemen from Wexford and Wicklow speak of their horses as Christians. The people of rural southern England wouldn't have batted an eyelid at Ted's description of Papillon; it is common currency in Devon and Dorset, Somerset and Cornwall.
You'll hear Cornish people speak of a cat who is an expert mouser as "a real Christian of a cat"; cunning is implied here, as it was in the case of a terrier which belonged to William Barnes, the 19th century Dorset poet and scholar. Barnes referred to his terrier as "a Christian of a dog", because of his ability to herd hordes of rats from a threshing away from the dwelling house, down the haggard to the labourers who waited for them with spades and shovels. The English Dialect Dictionary has an entry attributed to a Shropshire woman whose dog would get up on a wall "an' bark like a krischun, he knowed so well who wuz a-comin".
Mary McCarthy from Dooradoyle, Limerick, wants to know the origin of the word she spells plawmaws. Well, this is the Irish IT]plamas, the white mouth, flattery. Plamas is not a native word, however, and it made a fairly late entry into Irish literature: the scholar T.F. O'Rahilly suggested that Eoghan Rua O Suilleabhain (fl.1780) was the first writer to use the word. But it was in Irish earlier as blamas, attested to in Plunkett's dictionary of 1662. Its origin was blancmange which came into English in the 14th century from Old French, as blanc-manger, white food or dish, from blanc, white and manger, to eat. It was concocted from fowl, minced with cream, rice, almonds, sugar and eggs. Burke used the word figuratively for what Eoghan Rua called plamas: "Whenever that politic prince made any of his flattering speeches . . . when he served them with this, and the rest of the blanc-mange, of which he was sufficiently liberal . . ."
Cove is a word sent to me by Jane Browne from Waterford, who lives in Kent. She heard it used there of a stable. Yes, it is found in southern England, and also in the North Country and in Scotland. It is from the Old Norse kofi, a shed, a hut, a leanto. Unsuitable for Ted Walshe's oul' Christian, I imagine.