The lady who walks her dog past my horses every day was obviously eager to tell me something. I have exchanged only a few polite words with her in the past but as she made her way slowly towards my field gate, she lingered, cutting a lonely figure.

‘Let’s go and talk to that lady,’ I said to the builder boyfriend, who was busy holding Darcy the thoroughbred by her lead rope, scratching her neck as she likes him to do, while I put her rug on.

I always like to reach out to locals who seem friendly because the vast majority of passers-by in this neck of the woods seem to be thoroughly obnoxious. This lady always has her dog on a lead and is respectful of the horses. So I made a beeline for her on the basis that she might be the only nice person we ever meet walking by our field.

The builder boyfriend made a fuss of her little dog and she said she was on her own that day because her husband was in bed with a bad back. She said her daughter, also, was not well. She looked very odd for a few moments and then said: ‘She had a cardiac arrest a year ago. She’s 21.’ We stared back, open-mouthed, and she continued: ‘My husband came home and found her on the floor unresponsive. He managed to revive her by doing CPR because he’s trained as a first aider.’

As usual in these somehow increasing situations, we did not know what to say. ‘You mean the girl who sometimes walks past with the dog?’ She said yes, and I remembered how this girl walked very slowly and was deathly pale.

‘She was in a coma for a month and when they woke her up one side of her body wasn’t working. She lost the use of her right foot…’ And she began relaying other gruesome details, including her lungs being full of clots.

The builder boyfriend is not often speechless but he was struggling as much as I was to know how to proceed. We exchanged glances.

The lady kept going: ‘She was a fit and healthy girl. They said it had to be hereditary so they did genetic testing on our whole family. Nothing came back. They couldn’t find a reason.’ And she stared at us, as if she had gone to such a strange place with this that talking to two complete strangers about it was all that was left to her.

We both remained silent. And something hung in the air until the lady said it. ‘Six weeks before she collapsed she had…’

At this point, for reasons of sensitivity and inclusiveness, I would like to allow everyone to simply insert their own sentence ending, depending on what they want to believe. For example, you could end this sentence with ‘…a bowl of soup’, if you felt that was most in line with your ideological position.

Also, I’m quite prepared for people to say I’ve made this lady up, that she and her daughter don’t exist, because that happens now, when you say something people don’t want to hear. I’m well aware that reporting what I come across can produce cognitive dissonance.

I was amused to be told by an online comment at the bottom of one of my articles about the bricklayer who is being thrown out of AA meetings because of a #MeToo campaign that I had invented him. The bricklayer is amused by this too, and has said he is very happy to produce himself for verification, although we don’t know how that would work in practice.

Thankfully, the overwhelming response to my describing that situation was a postbag full of non-judgmental, liberal and compassionate comments.

Most readers understand that the worst part about the bricklayer story is I didn’t invent it. I get this all the time, sympathy that what I’m writing is true. I took the builder boyfriend to a dinner party once and people were delighted by the fact that he was really a jobbing builder with a cockney accent, and not the owner of a construction firm that I had styled as working-class for dramatic purposes.

Most people understand that I didn’t invent the builder boyfriend, any more than I invented the bricklayer, or the lady who walks past our horses and says her daughter had a cardiac arrest aged 21 and is now hooked up to a pacemaker and will be on heart meds for the rest of her days.

But I do understand how some bewildered souls might read my observations, and try to convince themselves I’m exaggerating. If you bought into the past few years, then your brain must be almost as addled as someone who didn’t. It’s hard to know what to believe.