And there he was.....gone

 The massive fly in the beauty of yesterday was that our lovely young Berner, Ritchie, cut himself badly the night before on a walk and this had gone undetected, or rather, undetected in the sense of how bad the cut was. By morning he was weak and lethargic and rushed to the vet a long time before opening. Thankfully it was all good, the vet was very reassuring, Berners have a lot of body fluids so leaking ones survive, and anyway they would give his spleen a good old squeeze to make sure he replaced all the lost red stuff. Suitably bandaged he was put in a kennel and allowed to rest while they got ready to operate and put his paw back together. By four pm they asked us to collect our groggy dog who greeted us with a waggy tail  while we were given the what to do once your pet has had an operation talking to.
Back at the ranch Ritchie wandered unaided but unsteadily to the kitchen where he lay and slept off the effects of the anaesthetic. He didn't eat, not even steak, he had a few laps of milk, but otherwise all seemed well.
At half ten Ritchie came into the lounge and climbed up onto the sofa next to me for some fuss before being turfed outside art eleven for a wee. He didn't come back.
Five minutes later I found him lying by the garden gate panting and not wanting to move. Some gentle persuading later he walked back to the kitchen and lay next to his bed. Which is where he stayed until he died.
This was, to say the very least an absolute shock, our fit young dog died from a cut on the paw. We found him at 3 am looking like he was sleeping peacefully, but very dead.  

 The day was already going to be a bad one without mourning our poor dog who had died after such as stupid accident. Chester our old gent of a thoroughbred was going to be looked at by the vet again as he had got much worse recently. He had stopped walking about, his joints were stiff, he was finding it difficult to stand and despite all the tlc and uber expensive feed, he was wasting away. Vet duly arrived at early doors and found a household in shock over the death of Ritchie. He had more bad, but expected news, Chester could not be helped any further. Now yours truly had held a stiff upper lip until this point but with the day about to turn from bad to awful it all got a bit emotional.
Making arrangements for Chester's exit and Ritchie's post mortem was almost unbearable. But clichés ensued, dust, wind, dude, life goes on, worse things happen at sea, bad things happen in threes (the third was finding I had been eating full fat yoghurt all week not fat free, gutted) and so eventually the course was set for the day. I packed Ritchie into the vets car where he looked for all the world like he was snoozing (dead dog not vet) and we all said our goodbyes to Chester as he munched a final meal in the weak sunshine.

Cowardice meant I could not be around while the vet put Chester to sleep (spot the deliberate euphemism) so the family were herded into the car and we made ourselves scarce for the final act.
A dreadful day, our poor dog, our poor old horse, gone.
The post mortem results were reassuring in a bizarre way as it established Ritchie did not die from a cut paw or blood loss. In an amazing stroke of bad luck Ritchie who is (was) the most bouncy of Berners had on his night time run about when he cut his paw, had also twisted his gut. Back at HQ he ate his supper and settled down to lick his paw. No yelping, no sign of distress, and when I looked I really didn't see anything on his paw that required stitching. He had in fact cut deep between the middle two toes and what I was looking at was a superficial pad wound. Anyway self loathing apart, what seems to have happened in the vets view is that the cut masked any signs of the twisted gut. So when he would not eat in the morning we all put this down to him being in shock. When he was sick at the vets it was put down to the effects of me giving him milk and them giving him medication. Him being under general anaesthetic totally hid the dire events going on with his bowel dying and when he came too he would not have been in any pain and any signs of what was going on was masked by the notion that he was just groggy from the operation.
Back home the irreparable damage done he lay still until moving ruptured the bowel and the toxins released killed him. Had it been spotted while in the vets for full crash team response would still have, almost certainly, led to the death of our dog. He was just an unlucky Berner that day.
So.
More cliché, to have good days you have to have bad ones, and today by any measure (unless the Tories get voted out) has been excruciatingly bad. As I type I feel worse than Nick Clegg reading the exit polls.
Ritchie was a fantastic dog, he loved us as much as we loved him and he adored the kids. Its such a shame such a lovely dog was lost in such a cruel way.
Chester was given to us some five years ago and has been the most accident prone but lovable equine you could ever wish to meet. He was a hunter and loved to canter up and down the lane, even if you didn't. He was a patient old boy, never minding having the apprentice on his back, bombproof in every way and ever keen to come into the cottage. He loved it here but the quality of his life had just got so poor over the last two weeks and we had no choice but to end his suffering.
Tomorrow will be a better day.
Unless David Cameron is still PM.