I let Mini Puppy off the lead for her morning walk, and by 4.30pm she was still motoring up and down the lane, oblivious to my entreaties.
I just could not catch her. Eventually, she turned up at the front door, absolutely soaking, fur on end like Sonic the Hedgehog, filthy dirty.
As my house is rented, I have become even more obsessed than usual about cleanliness. I won’t buy kiwi fruit, ever, as they leave little hairy speckles in the fruit bowl.
So I went out to join Mini with a bucket of warm soapy water and a towel. Having washed her, I reached for the towel and in that split second she dashed indoors. ‘Mini Pupp!’ I shouted. ‘Nooooo!’
But in that moment she had violently shaken her fur, splattering the cream walls and cream carpet with dirty water. I ran towards her, meaning to usher her into the kitchen, and she cowered on the floor.
I must appear so full of rage to them, my animals, for her to do that, though I have never smacked her, and never would. No wonder Michael the sheepdog has a skin allergy.
It hasn’t been as easy as I had hoped, this transition, this downsizing. Small things keep going wrong. I bought a Miele vacuum cleaner, to cope with the dog and cat hair, and then the wrong dust bag turned up; I must have chosen the wrong one, but then why give me so many options?
My dog Gracie had chewed through the hose on its back. Then, on the way to pick up horse feed, the back windscreen of the Land Rover shattered.
Today, alone again looking after the horses, I was wheeling hay to the field, and the string from the bale wound round the barrow’s wheel, like Isadora Duncan’s scarf, so it won’t turn at all. I had to carry the bale across the field, hands frozen, falling over and over again.
The shower leaks, and dribbles hot water. The gas for the heating here costs £260 a month. My final electricity bill for the farm was £2,500, despite the fact I paid three, four hundred pounds every quarter. My laptop broke, and the insurance people say it’s not covered.
I went to use my spare, the white laptop my husband bought me when he was feeling guilty about his affairs and was yet to confess to them, but it wouldn’t switch on; only then did I notice the cable was covered in teeth marks.
Lizzie the ex-racehorse has yet another abscess.
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This is why my relationships never work. They are never perfect, unspeckled.
Only this time it is me, not him, who is spoiling things. Just as a child I never invited other children round to tea, as I was ashamed of the threadbare three-piece suite, the peeling paint on the windows, so now I’m ashamed at what has happened to me.
I am so loath to live with the RS* because I don’t want him sucked into this mire, into a place where everything goes wrong.
Nic, my assistant, keeps saying that things happen for a reason, but I don’t know that they do. It all seems so random.
I am loath to live with him because I don’t want him sucked into this mireI feel that no matter what I do, however hard I try, I will never claw myself out of the mud, both literal and metaphorical. I keep saying to myself, in the dead of night, ‘How did this happen to me?’
On Friday night, I went to meet my friend Issy in the pub. She told me a spooky story. Her friend has just lost her dad. She was in his house, going through his things, and found a picture she had drawn as a small child. It was a large, pink paper crown, the sort you get in a Christmas cracker, and next to it she had written, in crayon, the word ‘heaven’.
She emailed a photo of this to Issy, followed by another email, the photo she had taken of her dad at Christmas, just a couple of days before he died.
In the photo, he is wearing a large pink paper crown. I wonder if our destiny is waiting for us, even when we are six or seven. It is all laid out. It unfolds, like a cream carpet.