10/28/2026
Three weeks ago, the vet looked at me with The Look, and left a sentence unfinished. It is always when they don’t finish the sentence that you know you are in trouble.
I said, ‘What is the end of that sentence?’
He said, ‘We’ll have to think about putting her down.’
I stood quite silent for what felt like a long time. I felt the drained dread, the cold feeling which is both hollow and full of weight, that you get when someone gives you bad news. I know the feeling of bad news. I literally can feel my atoms reconfiguring themselves.
I asked some questions. I felt my voice come out from a great distance, as if someone else was talking. That someone else said, ‘We’ll give her one more chance.’
My friend Emma said, ‘Let’s give her another go.’
And then something marvellous happened. I blossomed into pure, scarlet, fire-hot rage. It was rage against everything - the fates, bad luck, the very possibility of death. I was going to save this horse if I had to do it with my bare hands. I’d already, with the intense kindness of strangers, with doubling my work-load, with writing a book in seven weeks flat, paid thousands of pounds of vet bills. I’d conjured that money out of thin air and if you’d asked me beforehand I’d have said it was impossible. Now I had one more mountain to climb. It was the mountain of The Wound That Would Not Heal.
I wrote somewhere, probably here, I am going to heal her with love and honey.
I can’t tell you how much fierce, top strength, medical grade Manuka honey I got. I can’t tell you how much love I gave her. I crooned in her ear and I sang to her and I laid my hands on her and I did that heart maths thing where you imagine your whole heart encompassing the beloved. Who knows what that is or whether it works? I have a bit of an empirical mind, but then if I went back to Elizabethan England and stood in the audience at The Globe during a performance of Hamlet and tried to explain to the people about electricity, they would burn me as a witch. It is this thought that kept my mind open. Some of you sent healing energy. Some of you prayed for her, to your gods. Some of you held her in your hearts. Was it the love or the honey or the energy or the prayers or the songs or just dumb luck? I don’t know. My guess is: probably all those things.
I think it helped hugely that she is very happy at HorseBack, with the contented herd about her, coming and going. The horses there work with veterans and troubled children so they are intensely trained for calm and peace and also chosen for their steady temperaments. I think it made a difference that I could spend long hours with her rather than just popping in and out for minutes when she was at the vet hospital. It think it made a difference that my friends Emma and Charlotte watched over her in the late evening and early dawns, and they were on her side.
Did it make a difference that I fed her feeds redolent with mint and marigold and rosehips and turmeric and echinacea and whatever else I could find to boost her immune system? I don’t know. Probably a little bit.
The point is, this week THE VET WAS PLEASED.
He’s never pleased. Vets, I think, have to be stern maestros of expectation management. This week, he actually said, ‘It looks good.’
We’ve still got a fairly big open wound but it looks fabulous to me. There is new pink skin. The surrounding skin is mobile and healthy instead of paper-thin and pulled tight as a drum, which was the problem last time. She is merry as a grig.
I think that she is going to be all right.
I hadn’t realised how much I did not know that until just now. I feel the weight of the possibility of disaster fall off my shoulders at last.
We need a bit more good luck and a bit more love and a bit more honey. Thank you, to those of you who sent your wishes and your prayers and your thoughts and your healing energy. Thank you to those of you who bought the book and took out the Place of Peace subscriptions and who - amazingly, and without asking for anything in return - bunged wedges of cash into my PayPall account. I accept all of it, with keen gratitude and love.
It’s such a cliché, to say it takes a village. Well, it damn well does take a village. It’s a cliché because it’s true. Tern the Bird and I were very lucky, because it turned out that we had a village, and that made all the difference.
