‘You’re very easy to deal with, I must say,’ said the tall, handsome vet who was examining the spaniel.

I laughed. ‘That’s not what the last vet said.’ The last vet sacked me after I asked to see my dog’s notes.

After a long and arduous battle with corporate vetdom, I made my way down south to a proper country practice and a chap recommended by my horse vet. He was old-fashioned, I was assured.

An old-fashioned vet simply means a vet who will make a diagnosis by using his expertise and experience, causing minimal distress to the animal, and not charging you many, many thousands for high-tech invasive testing that will get you no further forward.

I could pay a specialist to scan, biopsy and aspirate every lump and bump in my dog until she gave up the will to live. Or I could allow a man who has seen it all to examine her, take a history, do blood tests, X-ray her, weigh up the possibilities and give me his best guess.

Because the real problem is not the money. The real problem is that if a specialist found conclusive proof of malignancy, he would then have campaigned to do some very distressing things to her that would probably have failed. They rarely last long after the trauma and the chemotherapy. So around £10,000 to give my dog the worst few months of her life as an end?

Who would do that? I told this old-fashioned vet to do what he could reasonably do in-house. It didn’t take long, and the dog wasn’t distressed by it.

The answer came back as we had suspected. It was probably this rather than that. If it was that, then no need to poke her about anyway, but if it was this, then there was nothing you could reasonably do about it.

Cydney and Poppy threw themselves around the consulting room floor as the vet and I discussed options, for I had brought both spaniels.

He laughed as he watched the two dogs frolicking. He said I was easy to deal with because I was realistic. I suppose he meant about the facts of life and death, the realities of dealing with an aging dog. I have faith that all God’s creatures have their season, and that if it is not her time, then we will be blessed with her for a little longer.

The vet agreed with me that the kindest thing was to maintain her with meds for any possible inflammation and spoil her rotten.

‘Give her steak on the weekends,’ he said. ‘On the weekends?’ I exclaimed. ‘You don’t know Cydney. She wants steak every night.’

In fact, she is enjoying a hearty breakfast of Royal Canin, a light luncheon of poached chicken breast, and a supper of either chicken, salmon or steak.

The little black working cocker has become more of a spoilt brat than ever, and her behaviour is so demanding it’s hysterical. She finishes her meal and then pushes Poppy out of the way so she can snaffle from her bowl as well. Poor Popps is a big girl so it’s probably just as well she misses a few mouthfuls because three meals a day would be too much for her.

And then there are the toys, which I used to keep locked away so they didn’t fight over them. Because I have this anxiety in the back of my mind that we are now on the clock, I have allowed them to get as many items out of the toy chest as Cydney wants.

She looks so young still, she never has grown up, so when she growls at us for her toys it is like watching a puppy.

In her basket, piled up next to her she has a large green frog with a golden crown on its head who we call Froggo, a very grubby small sheep, the imaginatively named Sheepy, and an absolutely knackered pig with long dangly legs, one hanging by a thread, that once had a squeaker in its middle. This is Pigly, her favourite toy.

Cydney grabs Pigly and throws it at the builder boyfriend when he comes home in the evening and the BB has to make Pigly do his song: ‘I’m a little pig, eat me up!’ this butch south London builder sings to a little dog, pretending the mangled toy is singing by moving it like a puppet. And Cydney goes wild and leaps in the air with delight.

In the evening, about 7 p.m., she gets into her bed and if anyone hangs around the kitchen she whines until we put the lights out so she can go to sleep. We do this, without hesitation, obviously.

For however long we have her, she’s the boss.

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