Les Lamas de l'Aubaine

Okay. So I lied about the crying. I may have just done a teeny weeny bit more when the vet was busy locating a vein in Max’s front leg to insert the syringe, and I was stroking his face, and reassuring him that everything would be all right. Hmmm… I suppose that depends on your definition of all right. But to be honest, Max didn’t seem very bothered about it anyway. I think he just wanted her to hurry up and go, so he could go back to sleep.

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Today is the last day of Max’s life. I’m not sure that he is making the most of it. But then I’m rather hoping he doesn’t understand that it is his last day. Unless he wants it to be.

The vet is coming at five o’clock to put us out of his misery, and Simon is out with the digger at this very moment preparing a hole for Max’s imminent burial. It all seems so incredibly bizarre. So pre-planned. So practical. It feels like Max is a condemned dog on Death Row, and I feel that we should be offering him one last favourite meal and a cigarette. Except that he has totally lost his appetite, and has a terrible cough.

This is harder than I thought it would be.

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Well. I am alone again for a few days, while Simon is in England, and as usual experiencing the weirdness of the first few hours of solitude. Until I remember how to do ‘being alone’. But, as I sit here writing this, with a glass of red wine, a bowl of peanuts and a packet of digestive biscuits next to my laptop, in a room full of sleeping dogs, with all the animal chores for the day complete, it is beginning to come back to me. And suddenly I know that ‘dinner’ as such will not occur, and that bed-time will be very late, and that my inner teenager will be in charge (albeit with an unusually well-developed sense of responsibility for the welfare of the animals) until Simon returns.

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Simon is in Moulins at this very minute, having been summoned to an ‘examination’ by the MSA (mutual insurers for farmers) in respect of his recent ‘Professional Illness’. He has gone armed with a barrel-load of literature about the evidence required for a diagnosis of Lyme Disease, proof that it is recognised as a professional illness by the various Powers That Be, and a wad of receipts and prescriptions showing all the charges that he believes the MSA should pay for in their entirety. Oh, and a French dictionary. He likes to be prepared.

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