I ask myself why am I still going on about this? It’s a minority voice in my head but it is gaining support. My psyche has most compassionately walled off the remembered experience of the 3rd of October. I am, however aware that it is walled off not gone. It sends messages that it is still there. I find myself with tears on my face when people look at me a second time in the supermarket. I find I can’t reply when I meet someone I haven’t seen since he died and they say how sorry they are. When I want to draw something and instead I go ti the draw with unfinished art, take an armful and put it in the bin. None of it has anything to do with who I seem to have become.

I think about stuff like “what is value?”

Murphy came from the SSPCA. Although obviously pure bred and from really handsome inheritance lines, he was unwanted. He came without a pedigree and neutered…..for very good reasons so that nobody would adopt him for the wrong reasons. He was 12. His “value” was zero. He was, in law, a possession. No value at all.

What about my distress? What value my sleep, my appetite, my intrusive thoughts, the loss of my fundraising art business, the quality of my life…..which is radically changed. Not because he died, but because one individual took it upon herself to stress (distress) him so repeatedly and for so long that when she gave him back to me he looked so knocked off I thought he must have had a cardiac arrest. Apparently that person can walk away and do it again to someone else’s dog/cat/rabbit…..whatever thing of “no value” that holds a huge place in their hearts. Is any litigation going to recognise that the quality of an old woman’s life is of any value?……especially when earnings are not a consideration.

This all seems so wrong that I can’t put it down. I can’t leave the pain walled up in my chest like an abscess. Nor can I see a clear way forward….yet. But I can be very tenacious and very determined when it suits me.

Right now it suits me.