I start drinking straight after breakfast and carry on all day, until I pass out at night… by the long-time editor of Good Housekeeping LINDSAY NICHOLSON

The witching hour is 6pm. That’s when I turn to my most reliable lover, Mr Sauvignon Blanc. Unlike my first husband, he will never die, and unlike my second, he will never cheat on me. Faithful and consistent, he is always there to soften the passage from day to blurry evening.

These days, depression descends like a fog, putting a stop to the ceaseless activity that has ruled my life for so long. I have lived on adrenaline for months, letting it power me through divorce negotiations in 2017 with Mark, my husband of 12 years, and, shortly after, through a redundancy process that has seen me lose my job of 18 years, as editor of the best-selling lifestyle magazine Good Housekeeping.

But now that adrenaline evaporates. Sometimes I start drinking straight after breakfast and carry on all day, right through until I pass out at night.

I have no need of the blind energy that drove me back to work after the death of my first husband, the investigative journalist John Merritt, in 1992. Instead, I need to blot out all thoughts — especially when they veer towards the death of my eldest daughter Ellie, who was just nine when she died from the same cruel disease as John, leukaemia, in 1998.

Wine stops the nightmares too. Now, in a haze of alcohol and antidepressants, I sleep late every morning, turning off the alarm that rings at 7.30 and dozing until 10am, or much later, nursing a hangover.

At the age of 61, I stop looking after my health and my appearance. My weight, that ever reliable barometer of my mood, increases steadily. When I am finally able to rouse myself, I select the least objectionable item from an ever-growing pile of stretched out leggings and musty sweatshirts on the bedroom floor.

The simple tasks of keeping myself fed and the house and my body reasonably clean seem to require immense amounts of energy that I — the person who regularly worked 16-hour days on a succession of glossies covering fashion, politics and royalty — can no longer muster.

Taking a shower feels like being pelted with hail stones and washing my hair brings on a headache. So, I don’t bother. For someone who operated on a strict regime of brow shaping, eyelash dying, bikini waxing and root retouching, now even brushing my teeth feels like an assault.

At least I am no longer homeless.

Before I discovered my ex-husband’s affair, he and I spent eight months refurbishing our ‘dream house’, a beautiful canal-side home in Hertfordshire.

And yet I was the one who left it when his infidelity emerged, spending another eight months living first with my elderly mother in Essex and then in a rented house, which I christened the Divorce House, five miles upstream.

Now I am back. In September 2017, I won a court case securing an occupation order in my favour, which not only required Mark to vacate it, but also meant he’d be arrested if he so much as set foot on the property. It felt like some small vindication.

Yet now I neglect this house I once poured my heart into. The stainless steel twin sinks in the high-spec kitchen I planned down to the last square inch become crusted with limescale. A grubby ring forms around the whirlpool bath. Dust bunnies congregate on the poured resin floors.

Long, lonely evenings marooned on my own in the house are made tolerable only by Mr Sauvignon Blanc. Wreathed in clouds of self-loathing, I shovel chocolate into my mouth, too, as if the sweetness will offset the sour curdling of my mind.

Mark, Lindsay’s husband of 12 years, continued living in their ‘dream home’ after his affair

The fact is, I do not think the way life has treated me is fair. Deep down, I am howling with a rage that could engulf a universe.

What more must I do? I have tried to be good, no matter what fate has thrown at me. When a fatal disease deprived me of my family, I prayed for their souls to the God who had betrayed me and them, then struggled to my feet and went back to work to keep a roof over the head of my younger daughter, Hope, with whom I was pregnant when John died.

I paid my taxes, was never in debt. I recycled, campaigned as an editor for better maternity benefits and flexible working, though it was never an option for me. I fought for more opportunities for women than I had in my own career.

At Good Housekeeping, I told the women of Britain how to organise their wardrobe, which bread-maker to buy, as well as which vibrator, how to decorate every room of the house for Christmas and put a meal on the table for a family of four in under half an hour.

I had breast cancer at the age of 51, but kept smiling through it, writing an upbeat blog about hair loss and surgery scars.

I married a man I fell in love with and who I thought loved me.

I played by the rules and coloured inside the lines. And still . . . still it came to this: jobless, betrayed, humiliated — and at an age when I thought I would be winding down and finding peace at last, after all the struggle and grief.

So finally, I allow myself to do what, perhaps, everyone expected me to do decades previously, after first John died, then Ellie. I let go of every ounce of restraint, caution and decent behaviour.

Fearful of seeing Mark, who is still driving around in the car that bears the personalised number plate of our entwined initials, I barely leave the house. I fear seeing the woman he left me for. But I do have to scuttle into town to collect my antidepressants, and it’s on one such trip that I hit rock bottom.

What I crave more than anything at this point in my life is sleep, and when I get to the pharmacy to discover my drugs aren’t ready to collect because of a mix-up, I start to lose it. Without the medication, I know I won’t be able to lose consciousness that night, and this is all I want.

I start to argue, and quickly become hysterical.

While shoppers stare, the pharmacist hustles me into the private interview room where every year I have my flu jab. She talks to me gently until I calm down. Then she rings the GP practice and sorts my prescription: ‘Yes,’ I hear her say. ‘It’s an emergency.’

It is only with hindsight that I realise what I must have looked like. Haunted by the thought of bumping into Mark and his lover, I am dressed head to toe in black. I wear huge sunglasses despite the fact it is a dull winter’s day, and my face is smeared with purple lipstick, a leftover from one of the beauty launches I often attended for Good Housekeeping.

I am a tall, screechy woman dressed as if for a funeral with purple clown lips. The finishing touch is a hippy-style necklace of tiger’s eye beads — amber in colour and striped with black — reputed to give the wearer confidence and strength, when in truth I have neither…

What saves me from this devastating downward spiral? The truth is, I fall in love again.

His name is Pablo and he is of mixed Argentinian and Irish heritage, with gorgeous dark brown eyes. A joker, he makes me laugh, which I don’t feel as if I have done for a long time.

Granted, he is only five years old, but he’s been carefully raised since birth, with no known vices other than a raging appetite for food of all kinds.

When I was 16 years old, growing up in Essex, I was given a fat dapple-grey pony called Trophy and I loved her dearly. But 30 years in a sedentary office job, breast cancer and osteoporosis, meant I’d honestly thought my horse-riding days were behind me. But then I see Pablo and decide to buy him as a birthday present to myself.

What a mad, risky gift at my age and state of health! But what a beautiful boy he is, with a coat the colour of a new penny, a broad white stripe — a blaze — down his nose, and three white socks.

After a spell of re-training, he is installed in stables near me in Hertfordshire and slowly he begins to transform my life.

Every day we work together, building our rapport until it seems I can ask him to go faster, turn or halt just by thinking. I stop drinking and get up early, even stretching every morning to remain supple enough to swing my right leg over his back.

I don’t care much about my physical appearance, but it changes anyway, becoming stronger and leaner with the increased activity. I discover biceps from lifting the saddle onto Pablo’s back.

After losing her first husband John and daughter Ellie to leukaemia in the 1990s, Lindsay herself battled breast cancer at the age of 51

I am outdoors every day, watching the seasons change, in all weathers and temperatures. Like a numb limb, I slowly come back to life. And then, on a mild March day, something extraordinary happens.

As I walk Pablo sedately around the arena, unknown to me, he is watching the yearlings frisking about with the early rays of sun on their backs in an adjacent field. Clearly Pablo, who is still a teenager in horse years, would rather be out playing with the kids than plodding peacefully along with me, and suddenly, full of unexpected adolescent rebellion, he spins through 180 degrees to face the opposite direction.

He humps his back and jumps with all four feet off the ground, and I fly up out of the saddle, and then he repeats this bronco act, bucking over and over again, until I lose a stirrup.

Thoroughly overexcited, giddy with his own naughtiness, Pablo takes flight, dashing the length of the arena at a flat-out gallop.

And at the end of the arena — getting closer every nanosecond — is a fence about a metre high.

Pablo wants to jump it, I know that, and I am equally sure that while I might be with him on take-off we will certainly land separately.

What I also know — but he doesn’t — is that he isn’t trained for this and that landing on the rutted, muddy ground on the other side, he will almost certainly fall and break a leg, which will be fatal for him. That I will go over his shoulder and break my neck is not in doubt either.

Neither of us will survive if Pablo attempts this jump.

Time seems to slow. I think of Ellie. The morning of June 11, 1998, when doctors told me she was slipping away, and I crumpled at the knees in the parents’ room at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Her funeral on a sunny day in Highgate Cemetery, North London. All the children from her class at school attended, bringing hand-made bouquets and posies, many of them with sunflowers which they had been growing in class.

I couldn’t save my child, so what made me think I could save my marriage or my job either? Can I save myself this time? Do I even want to?

But in that split second, I realise I have achieved the very thing I never dared hope for — out of all the pain, the trauma and grief, together with this horse, I have salvaged a life worth saving. I want to keep living. And I want to save Pablo too.

He has placed his trust in me and I have to honour that. I have to save us both.

The former editor of Good Housekeeping says purchasing horse Pablo saved her from a ‘devastating downward spiral’

I stop pulling on both reins and instead pull hard on just the inside rein, changing the angle of the bit and catching him by surprise. It works. Moments away from take-off we swerve, ‘motorbiking’, as if on two wheels away from the fence and certain disaster.

Momentarily frustrated, he attempts to go round again for another attempt but I keep hauling on the inside rein until the little horse turns reluctantly onto a circle, still thinking it’s a game.

Holding tight to a fistful of mane to balance myself, I make the circle smaller and smaller until he has no choice but to come back to a trot then a walk and then finally to a standstill.

He is sweating profusely, as am I, and in the mirrors at the end of the arena I can see his expression which seems to say: ‘I could have jumped that if you weren’t such a scaredy-cat!’

He is still quite hot when I put him back in his stable, so I put a sweat rug on him and wait until he cools down before feeding him his dinner. Only then do I go home — no one there to put a sweat rug on me or prepare my dinner.

I have done something to my hip in bracing for that handbrake turn, but I am here. Alive.

I pop a couple of Nurofen and lie on the sofa, conscious that something has changed deep inside me.

• Adapted from Perfect Bound by Lindsay Nicholson (£20, Mudlark) out July 18. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 31/07/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 31762937