This headless angel was turned up while clearing yet more rubbish from the garden today, towards the end of a long day, starting with being rudely awakened by a builder who’d been meant to show up yesterday so we’d sat in all day waiting and he showed up this morning when we’d got to go out to fulfil a commitment for the grand plan. So, he went away and promised to return tomorrow.

I’m not sure if the angel’s head was torn off in some demonic ritual (who knows with Mad Maureen – it could have been some kind of satanic thing especially as we did find the skull of a sizable animal under the hedge today too….ritual slaughter?) but more probably it got knocked off and ended up being chucked under a bush, because, well, that’s what bushes are for isn’t it – to hide rubbish under. They’re not? You could’ve fooled me – that’s what they all seem to have been used for here!

The shot is quite appropriate because I’m feeling a bit ‘crestfallen’. I have some demons the size of a house surfacing in my head, popping up around me and destroying sleep in addition to well-being.

You see my ghosts are back, but this time they’re worse because the stakes are higher.

A long time ago (it seems like a lifetime but in fact it’s about twelve years), my comfortable, peaceful, happy if loveless existence was shattered by an event so terrible that I still have nightmares about it. It’s not on the scale of some people’s nightmares but it was bad enough. I won’t go into all of the sordid, nasty detail but suffice to say, I caught my husband out. Not only that but I discovered his ‘infidelities’ had been going on for many years, almost back to the start of our marriage. I was away a lot, it was easy for him and ‘he thought I wouldn’t mind’ because ‘I never said he couldn’t’ – well, excuse me but I didn’t think I’d need to articulate that sort of thing!

Anyway, last night, through the experiences of a friend in trouble, I found myself reliving that time. The churning over and over of the ‘facts’ and the details. The denials and the recriminations. The sheer weight of misery of suddenly realising you’ve been a total fool and have been taken advantage of for years. The worse thing, in my view, is that I was too much of a coward to sort it once and for all. Years passed, the cycle continued, he’d join a gym and start taking an interest in his appearance. I’d realise it was happening again and I’d find more reasons to stay away and therefore he had more opportunity. I helped him to do it because I was so stupid. In the end you exist. You're numb. You just block out everything as a way of self-preservation.

DM knows all the gory details and he’s very sensitive to my needs – I need openness and honesty – I can’t cope with secrets. I just can’t.

Could it happen to me again? Of course it could. It would be so easy - I'm still away every week, I still work long hours. The panic rises up inside me over and over again. It surges through me and I feel small and frightened. He knows all of this. He can't help what went before but he has to deal with the fall-out.

He gives me free access to everything he does although I NEVER take advantage of the access to ‘look’. I know if I do, I’ll become obsessed and that would be a bad thing. I have to stick, however hard, to the ‘straight and narrow’ path of belief. In the back of my mind, I know that he is so technical that if he wanted to he could find ways to hide things from me and I would never be able to work it out. Also in the back of my mind I know that he’s not the person who made me feel like this. He’s never given me any cause to doubt him.

BUT – the stakes are high – in fact, they’re as high as they can go because I’ve now got so much more to lose. It’s no longer about simply a comfortable home, money or self-respect as they were back then, it’s about love - the thing that costs nothing but is priceless.

Last year, medals were being won at the Liskeard Show