We had planted a cluster of daffodils on the spaniel’s grave, but after a few days the weather battered them down.

Sadly, the little yellow flowers began to curl up and wither in the force of the wind and hail that was pelting the small wooded copse where we laid Cydney to rest.

I chose daffodils because her official name was Byrecoc Cinnamon Jonquil. I went to the farm shop and bought a large pot of the variety sometimes called narcissus, sometimes jonquil, a lovely old-fashioned name.

For two days they bloomed on the spot, and then they faltered. But on the fourth day when I visited, I realised, walking towards the place, that a most astonishing thing had happened. On an otherwise quite desolate corner of farmland, two trees next to her resting place had suddenly come into bloom.

In stark contrast to the others nearby that were brown and bare, they were a mass of white blossoms that dazzled like a blaze in the sunlight that was coming through the clouds. And as I got nearer I realised that countless of these blossoms had shed in the wind and were decorating the ground like confetti. The exact area of Cydney’s grave was covered in tiny white flowers. And I felt blessed.

In the car the next day, a most peculiar talk show was in progress. David Baddiel was publicising his new book, The God Desire, on the radio show of Jeremy Vine, who I think is a believer. Baddiel was trying to explain that he wanted to believe, but couldn’t, and by all accounts he has written a very moving and interesting book about this.

The callers seemed cross. One man railed that he refused to believe in God because he needed proof. Before the Big Bang there was nothing, he explained, but something can come from nothing because ‘science has proved it’. Ah science, I thought. The thing that has given us so much about which to be ‘sure’. And when science is proved wrong we use new bits of science to say we’re still happy with science, generally speaking.

As well as the ‘If God exists prove it’ caller, there was the inevitable demand to satisfy the question: ‘If God exists how come bad things happen?’ Vine asked one caller how he felt about this, mentioning Ukraine. Poor God, I thought, getting the blame for that when He’s probably tearing his hair out watching the devil get to work on free will, with Biden and Putin slugging it out.

But at that very moment a loud noise like an angry siren blared down the phone line. Mr Vine said words to the effect of ‘goodness, what was that?’ and the fella on the other end said he was sorry but he was at work and that was the end-of-break reminder siren. Mr Vine continued, asking the question again, but at the very point he mentioned God and bad things happening, the angry, loud, blaring foghorn rang out.

He and Mr Baddiel laughed it off. But I would put that down in a special notebook if I were them. I keep one. It’s called God-incidences. Broadly, occurrences with timings for which there are no odds. Whenever something happens that is out of the ordinary, and oddly timed, I write it down. It might be the wind blowing on my face at a strange moment. Or something more specific.

The other day, I was the speaker at an evening meeting at the Priory where I was a patient 22 years ago. A few hours before I went, I was rummaging around in the cellar of my house, trying to tidy up after the builder boyfriend had been doing some jobs down there. I found myself on my hands and knees tidying firewood, and out of the bare earth I spotted a ring with a large green stone. It was one I had bought in the gift shop they used to have in the Priory. I bought it a few days after I was admitted, at my lowest ebb, and at the start of a journey that has led me down this path of faith.

I don’t think there are any odds of finding a ring I have not seen since we moved into this house and which I have not worn for nearly 20 years. It was stored somewhere when we moved here, so what were the chances of me coming across it again after it fell into the bare earth of our renovations, hours before I was due back at the place where I bought it and where it became a symbol of a new beginning?

If you’re being tapped lightly on the shoulder by way of reassurance, I’d call that evidence, or even proof.