You ring the ordinary practice number, 01584 872 310, and it diverts to the mobile of whichever of the four vets is on call. You speak to a vet, not to a triage service — usually within a minute, occasionally after a short wait if they are already with another animal. They will ask you questions and give you an honest answer, and about a third of the time that answer is that it can safely wait until morning, which costs you nothing. If it cannot wait, you are asked to bring the animal to Temeside and the vet will be there before you are, because they live within ten minutes and the drugs, the notes and the theatre are all in this building.

Most practices now contract their nights to a dedicated emergency provider. It is entirely understandable — night work is brutal, it damages people, and rota cover is the single hardest thing about running a small practice. What it costs the client is continuity: at two in the morning you are seen by somebody competent who has never met your animal, in a building forty minutes away, and the notes that follow you back are a summary rather than a history. We have kept it because for a rural practice those forty minutes are sometimes the whole story, and because knowing the animal is a clinical advantage and not merely a sentimental one. It is the hardest thing we do and the thing we are least willing to give up.

The out-of-hours consultation is £180 between six in the evening and eight in the morning, at weekends and on bank holidays, plus whatever treatment is needed at the ordinary daytime rates. There is no separate call-out charge and no premium on drugs at night. That £180 is paid to this practice and it goes toward the rota rather than to a third party. Telephone advice is free, always, including at three in the morning and including when the answer is that you should come in. We would far rather field ten calls that did not need to become visits than miss the one that did.

Ring immediately, at any hour, for: difficulty breathing; a cat straining in the litter tray without producing urine; a deep or bleeding wound; suspected poisoning; a swollen, tight abdomen in a deep-chested dog; collapse; a seizure lasting more than a couple of minutes or repeating; a bitch straining in labour for more than half an hour without producing a puppy; or any eye injury. For everything else, ring anyway and let us decide with you — that is what the phone is for, and nobody has ever been made to feel foolish for asking.

Running our own rota means four people carrying a phone one night in four, every week of the year, on top of a full daytime list. It is the reason we are a slightly more expensive practice than the one in the next town, and we would rather say so than pretend the difference is quality of care. It also puts a hard ceiling on how large we can grow: a fifth vet would make the rota humane, and a fifth vet needs a fifth vet’s worth of work, and at that point you are managing a business rather than practising. Every few years we look at the arithmetic again, and so far the answer has always been that the night calls are the part of the job that most needs somebody who already knows the animal.

We will tell you before it happens, in writing, and we will tell you exactly who would be covering instead and where you would have to drive. You will not discover it on the website one Tuesday. The commitment on this page is the one most likely to come under pressure over the next ten years — rural rotas are getting harder to staff everywhere — and a promise that cannot survive being examined is not worth making. What we can promise is that the decision, if it ever comes, will be taken by the four people who answer the phone and by nobody else.