Lady Bathurst's year as High Sheriff of Gloucestershire will come to an end in April. She told Ryan Merrifield about a year of extreme highs and lows.

IN a year which has seen her husband, the ninth Earl of Bathurst, battling septicaemia, Lady Bathurst has endured a fascinating time of turmoil and triumph.

"It's been challenging and stressful but also extraordinarily revelationary regarding how kind people can be," she explained.

We were sitting in her living room at the Bathurst Estate.

She delighted in telling me about the hard work of the staff at Cheltenham General Hospital, where the Earl was admitted.

She said after he had recovered they told her when he first came in they didn't think he would survive.

"I'd phone up at two o'clock in the morning having a panic attack, saying how is he, is he okay?"

"He's absolutely fine, Lady B," she said, imitating the Welsh nurse who often tended to him. "You go and get some sleep and rest."

On April 2, Lady Bathurst will officially hand over the duties of High Sheriff to Lt Col Andrew Tabor, a role which has seen her travel the length and breadth of the county to help out and raise funds for a variety of charities.

"A lot of the next year is going to be about getting my husband fit again. I'm hoping he will be able to walk me down the aisle when I do the handover," she said.

"The High Sheriffing actually helped me a lot because I was able to completely take my mind off what was going on because I was concentrating on the job in hand," she said.

"You drive down the road and you see two people walking, holding hands and smiling, and I felt like screaming at them: how dare you be happy, my husband's fighting for his life!

"But then you realise, gosh, everyone's got their own lives and their own existences, but it's just really important to look out of your bubble and whatever tragedy is going on in that existence in that day, just look out and know that in the next bubble down somebody may have just got engaged or somebody may have just had a baby. Any wonderful thing could've happened.

"So I was able to box it up a bit, and go out of the house and get involved in somebody else's bubble. I think we should try to do that, I think we should all try to walk a mile in everybody else's shoes."

The Earl came in from time to time, still adjusting to life temporarily confined to a wheelchair while he recovers. Though he was very cheerful.

"Our evenings, when we are home, are spent in here, this is our little den," Lady Bathurst told me. "We are either reading or doing work. Quite often doing work, because during the day you don't have time to get to the desk. Or we're just sat chatting."

She explained that while her husband often likes to go to bed early, she prefers to stay up late.

"I'm a night owl. I like to have a bit of downtime by myself just to quietly unwind from the day."

She said the twilight hours are also when she's most creative too.

"The other time that I have my ideas – and this is going to make you laugh – it's while I'm in the bath, because you're completely switched off and you can let your mind wander.

"Creativity in water. It must be because you feel like you're returning to the womb so you go back to basics."

An avid reader and writer, one of her first acts as High Sheriff was to set up a reading club for the inmates at the Eastwood Park Women's Prison.

"I started it but then backed off to allow them to build it, so now I just go to the odd meeting to support them.

"We started off reading The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory. The first page the Duke of Buckingham gets his head lopped off, so they loved that."

Among the many things on her bucket list for after her term ends, Lady Bathurst plans to write a book of her own.

"I can't tell you what it's about," she said. "It's a biographical novel, of a woman and a horse, and that's all I can tell you because it's a true story. But I love writing and I love the written word and so I'm relishing it. I've done a few chapters already, but I'm relishing the prospect of carrying on with that.

"So I'm going to be travelling quite a bit to spend time with the subject, and we're going to be writing this book together."

Living in a home steeped in such history, and in taking up such an historic post as High Sheriff, which first came into existence as a keeper of the peace in the tenth century, she is fascinated with the past.

"Our history is such an important part of our society today," she said.

I asked her what her favourite time periods were.

"I'm particularly interested in the Tudor period but I also like the Regency period as well. It was so flamboyant and beautiful. With bad teeth. And no running water or electricity.

"I wouldn't have been fun living in those times, would it? I think I'd like to time-travel there for a week, that would be it.

"One of the things I regret not doing in school was listening in my history lessons. I had a lousy history teacher too, who didn't make it interesting.

"We had a wonderful guy, Richard Holmes, who very sadly died of a heart attack a few years ago, but he came here once and did a talk on Wellington in aid of the Armed Forces Benevolent Fund, and I thought to myself, I'm going to have to pretend to be interested in this because I immediately was getting into that school psyche again.

"Do you know, three hours went like that," she clicked her fingers.

"I was enthralled and he made it so alive and so fascinating.

"I thought 'God, I wish you were my history teacher'. I'd probably be a history professor by now because it was just amazing. He was wonderful to listen to, and I think about six months later he died of a heart attack. I was devastated."

Despite her love of the more lavish periods of history, she prefers to dress simply.

"I hate shopping. I really hate shopping. I buy my jeans from the same place, and I have done for years. They're just ones that fit and look nice. These boots must be 20 years old. I'm not a clothes horse at all, I'm not good at buying clothes. Handbags, but I don't buy very many. I seem to have accumulated a lot over the years."

"What's my weakness?" she said without me prompting her. "Jewellery. And I like having nice nails. A good manicure."