Miriam Halloway MRCVS is the senior partner and the great-granddaughter of Alice Wren’s first assistant, which she finds less romantic than clients do. She qualified at Liverpool in 1998 and does most of the practice’s medicine and all of its difficult conversations. Theo Nkemelu MRCVS leads surgery and holds the RCVS Advanced Practitioner qualification in small animal surgery; he came to us from a referral hospital in Birmingham because he wanted to know his patients’ names. Rosa Pemberton MRCVS runs farm and equine and is on the road by half past seven most mornings, which is why she is rarely at the front desk. Bea Sandford RVN is our head nurse, has been here twenty-two years, and runs the nurse clinics, the dental charting and, in practice, the rest of us.

It would be simpler not to. Farm work is unsociable, weather-dependent and considerably less profitable per hour than a consulting room, and every business adviser who has looked at us has suggested dropping it. We keep it for two reasons. The first is that this is a market town in the Marches and a practice that abandons the farms around it is not really the town’s practice any more. The second is that mixed practice makes better vets: a clinician who has spent Tuesday morning with a hundred ewes has a different sense of proportion about a poorly rabbit on Tuesday afternoon, and that is worth more to our small-animal clients than they realise.

The original 1911 daybook sits in a case in the waiting room, open at a page from the March of that year. It records a visit to a mare on Whitcliffe, a dog with a torn pad, and a fee of three shillings and sixpence written in Alice Wren’s hand. We keep it out for the obvious sentimental reason and for a less obvious practical one: it is a reminder that everything in this building is a record somebody will want to read later. We still write notes as though somebody will, which is why our clinical histories are longer than most and why clients who move away are often surprised how much detail comes with them.