The horse dentist put down his medieval-looking implements and pinned me to the spot with a look.

‘Those guys,’ he said, reaching into the yawning jaws of the builder boyfriend’s black and white cob to check the back teeth he had just filed, ‘load horses and take them from England to Ireland and from Ireland to England all day, every day, so don’t make a fuss. I know you. You’ll worry about everything and drive them mad. Just let them do their job. They’re professionals. Right, that one’s done.’ And he handed me back Jimmy, who was licking his newly done gnashers.

We stood by the field gate in the blistering sunshine, and the horse dentist began cleaning his implements in a bucket while giving me a stern talking to.

In his blue overalls, with his tanned arms and blond quiff, he cuts a commanding figure. You have to listen to the horse dentist, because he is a wickedly sarcastic man brandishing a power tool and wearing a belt full of other instruments so baffling there is no way for you to understand what they are and what he might do with them.

Also, he talks complete sense and is one of my favourite people. He has seen it all on his rounds, added to which he buys and trains eventers, which means he is used to going to and from Ireland with horses.

Having rubber-stamped my decision – in fact, he was delighted for me – he now saw that his next task was to allay my stupid female horse-owner fears about the move.

‘Oh, but what if it’s a rough sea… oh, but what if Darcy won’t load… oh, but she’s very sensitive and she might not like the motion of the ferry…’ On and on it went.

The thoroughbred does not load well, but this is mainly because I’m so daft I don’t regularly take her to anything that involves loading because I’m worried she might not like it. As with most things equine, it’s a vicious circle. If you don’t load a horse often enough, they don’t load.

The last time we moved her from one farm to another we had to order a different lorry a day for a week until she agreed to like one of them and get on it.

Friend after friend brought their lorries, big and small, and each one was snorted at by Darcy until one day a lady called Karen came in a two-loader with a particularly shallow ramp and, while sucking on a vape pipe, performed a horse-whispering miracle by simply telling Darcy very quietly that she was going to get on it, which she instantly did.

Possibly, Darcy had just got bored of looking at ramps being lowered and decided to walk up this one for a change instead of standing in front of it for an hour while various people tried various techniques including those gleaned from YouTube videos with and without ropes and lunge lines, which Darcy thought very amusing, while I stood behind her weeping with frustration.

I told the horse dentist all this, shouting over the noise of his battery-operated filing machine which buzzed away as he worked, and when he had finished he fixed me with his especially patronising look.

He pointed to the builder boyfriend’s docile cobs, Jim and Duey, and our pushy little palomino, Goldie: ‘Those two cobs will load, and that pony will load. So they’ll load the two cobs, then Darcy will go on, then the pony.’ I exhaled. He was right. He clanked his implements about saying: ‘They do this all day long, seven days a week. It will be fine.’

And then he bit his lip and said: ‘Only, if I were you… There was a dramatic pause.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Well,’ he said, reddening slightly in the face, ‘I’d have four nice big haynets ready to put on the lorry…’

‘What!’ I screamed. ‘You mean, they don’t hay them!’

‘And I’d have a bucket of water ready. Just sneak it on there.’

‘A bucket… What are you saying!’ I became hysterical.

It wasn’t until I had wailed for five minutes about reversing my plans that I realised the horse dentist was tittering away to himself. ‘Right,’ he said, loading his power tools and jaw openers into the car, thoroughly pleased with his morning’s entertainment. ‘I’m going.’ He sat in the car with his tanned arm on the open window, still laughing at me as he said he would see me in Ireland in six months. He’s there so often he’s going to carry on doing our horses’ teeth in the new place when we get there.

The new place would appear to be the big Georgian pile. Two days after I made it, my offer was accepted.