Saturday mornings were usually a highlight of the week. The house would be alive with activity—Saskia doing her music practice on the piano in the sitting room, while Marina would bake bread or cakes in the kitchen, and Rosie would run back and forth between them like a mad dog, never quite sure whether she wanted to be with Sassy, as was usual, or with Marina in the hope of a dropped titbit she could then consume.

Or maybe Marina would ask some of our neighbours to pop round for a coffee, especially Tim and Paula Gaucin and their daughter Annabel, Sassy’s best friend from school.

But none of that was happening today.

Instead, Rosie lay on her bed, looking up at me with a questioning expression, as if asking what had happened to her playmates.

Irish setters in general have an unjustified reputation for being stupid dogs, but Rosie clearly realised that something wasn’t right. At one point, she came over and leaned against my leg, as if wanting to give me some comfort. Aged eight and a half, she was now getting to be quite an old lady in dog years. We’d had two other red setters in her lifetime, one older, one much younger, but they had both died early and Rosie now seemed content to be alone as the centre of attention.

I wondered if Saskia was missing Rosie more than she was missing me? And what would happen to our lovely dog if I couldn’t get my family back together again. Never mind Rosie, I suddenly thought. What would happen to me? I would be fifty in a couple of months. What would I do? Was I too old to start again? Oh God.

I decided I had to stop feeling sorry for myself. There were worse things that could happen, like dying in a fire.

The thought made me reflect on the death of Thomas Cranmer, first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII, who, in spite of signing papers recanting his Protestant faith, was later burned at the stake as a heretic by the Catholic Queen Mary. In his final moments, he declared that Protestantism was the only true religion and he should never have signed the recantations, thrusting what he called his ‘unworthy’ signing hand first into the flames.

Life, and death, is clearly all about hands. That and religion.

Pushing such morbid images aside, I made a cheese and pickle sandwich for my lunch and marvelled, not for the first time, at how wonderful it was to be able to spread butter on a piece of bread using my two hands—one holding the knife and the other the bread. With just one, you could find yourself chasing the bread all the way round the kitchen worktop. I knew. I’d done it hundreds of times.