Cerberus was a dog I inherited when I moved in with Gordon – she was loyal and brave and famously sat outside the barn all night when I had gone in, to await a calving, and fallen asleep under the hay rack. Nosey to a fault would follow me backwards and forwards across the kitchen – between sink and stove – heedless of my grumbles and when shut outside would leap up and down to peer in the bedroom window and yelp. Could she ever yelp! Gordon said that when he selected her, she was the one who came over, looked up and yelped at him.

Cerberus has been long under the grass – she was the first dog I ever had to PTS alone and also the first, and so far, only, one of the dogs I had to bury alone. I was 23. That sort of thing was dealt with by Dad till then – and I expect Gordon would say it was down to his mum in their house – and he was away at the time. The buck stops with us all eventually, and for me it was Cerberus. I have had to step up many times since to make money as a farmer, to eat, and from compassion.
I never feel Cerberus is very far away – even though she was not ‘my dog’. I have had dogs since who were more my dogs than Gordon’s and we have had others he has connected more with. Cerberus looks out of this picture at me when I have to do difficult things, and she seems to say to me that I can cope with things I wish I didn’t have to do when I have to.
It is not OK to take any life – for sport or money or compassion unless you know you will do it right and see it through. Equally, it is not OK to duck the issue and pretend that you are right because of it.
My books are set in the countryside – they encompass life and death, and I pull no punches in my stories for young children, young adults or adults as I have made those decisions and seen them through and I know how hard and scary that is, but I also know that death is part of life and that managing it and yourself is vital in a world of taboo and ignorance.
It is increasingly difficult for town and country folk to mix in the countryside – due to the Health and Safety regulations as much as anything that are, on the one hand, keeping us safe but on another keeping us apart and stopping us learning at a young age the basic facts of life and of, as a nation, feeding ourselves. How we, as informed adults, behave is our choice, but it can only be made from experience, and that is something very hard to come by now. Without experience, it is hard to work out if the knowledge we read about is true or not.
The deep ethical questions we all face – how much is a life worth? How much fun is it to kill for sport? Can you eat that? Should you eat that? Can you pass on an old horse to a good home? Should you keep your pet alive at all costs? Should you be attacked for your choices on Socal Media? What are insurance companies creating? Are they making animals lives better or making owners pay for vivisection? Can you keep a rat in a cage? Should you keep a single cat in a flat and never let it out? Are animals only here as companions to us? What are animal rights, anyway? Why do we think like we do? Who informs us? What axe are they grinding that we cannot see? How is eating one way or another right or wrong? What is food security? What is it to be self sufficient? Will we ever get rid of the plastic menace? What about the betting industry?
All that before you get into BREXIT.
This week I was looking at the themes in my YA series as I edited it and deepening them where I felt I had glossed over in First Draft. Very hard to gauge what to include and what to leave out – and all the time Cerberus has looked across at me, and at times I have almost stepped around her – reminding me that the veil is thin and that I have other books to write about that and to get a move on with what I am doing  🙂