Having loaded the last sack of working dog food in Surrey into my car, I slammed the trolley back into the trolley park and shouted an expletive at no one in particular.

‘What have you done to your lovely country store?’ I thought about asking one of the sales assistants inside the newly revamped posh dog food shop that used to be a warehouse for horse feed and pet supplies. But the likelihood was they didn’t care.

Shiny displays with video presentations about the latest craze in frozen ‘fresh’ ready meals for dogs now took up most of the space, along with aisle upon aisle of extremely expensive pouches for pooches, those silly little cartons of allegedly organic dog food that I would have to feed in bulk to the point of bankruptcy to satisfy my lot.

I walked up and down the aisles for ages before finding three stray sacks of good old ‘Chudleys’, which still carries a royal warrant showing that it used to be By Appointment to the Queen. I would have King Charles down for the poochy pouches.

There was a Chudleys Working Crunch, an Original and a Salmon flavoured. They were running it down, obviously, on the basis that it was only £23 for a huge sack that is highly nutritious.

The spaniels’ preferred chicken and rice cartons were also in scant supply, no doubt because at £17.95 for 12 large servings it was judged to be way too much meat for the money.

The rest of the produce in this once great store was just the sort of nonsense the clueless classes would love to be charged any amount of money for, on the basis that the packaging told them how much they loved their dog.

It occurred to me that those who want frozen ‘fresh’ ready meals called Mitsy and Boo, or whatever, will be buying it online. Serves this lot right if they go bankrupt.

I looked around for horse feed but there was none that I could see. I stopped a store helper in a flashy uniform and she pointed to the far wall beyond the bird seed. Eventually it transpired that if I turned left at the furthest corner, by a completely un-signposted blank wall, I would happen upon a small store room round the back where, stacked to the ceiling because of the lack of space, were all the banished sacks of pony nuts, sugarbeet, oats and chaff that had formerly taken up most of the store.

I was in such a bad mood on seeing this that I slammed my trolley into a stack of chaff sacks, threw one on, then stormed off as much as one can storm while pushing a heavy load. Another helper in uniform – there was an army of them – started to recite some pre-learned script about how much he wanted to help me make my selection today, so I told him to chaff off.

‘Let me help you with that!’ beamed the checkout girl as I tried to push my trolley up to a long, high counter that was designed for someone putting down a couple of poochy pouches, a faux-fur dog cage poochy pad, and a hand-crafted pack of biodegradable pink poochy poo bags – 99p each or £4.30 for a pack of four.

She made an elaborate fuss of coming around the counter to scan my items with a hand-held device. And I made an elaborate fuss of not thanking her, standing there in stony silence, because it was entirely their decision not to have a low counter for scanning feed sacks from their seat.

I slammed my loyalty card down and asked for whatever was on it. ‘Er, there’s only £1.50 on that,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it,’ I said, ‘because I’m not coming back.’

And so into my car boot went the last sack of Chudleys Working Crunch in Surrey. A sad moment, as I make my exit from a county that has become one big dog park with a cycling track around it.

Surrey is also a frontier. How long suburbanisation takes to reach a more rural idyll near you is down to the amount of housing needed, and the amount of people wanting to work from home in a leafy place where they can keep a dog, get on a bike, and demand the farmers’ market goes vegan.

The fleeing suburbanites want to look at horses in fields. But because of the suburbanites, there are fewer and fewer places to keep horses, or ride them, or buy their food.

The once five-minute journey from my house to my horses’ field now takes 45 as the Highways Agency fells trees and tarmacs the heathland.

‘Improving your journey’, is how the signs describe it. Your journey to what?