‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I’d better do this one myself. You start going through the call-ins and I’ll join you as soon as I get this sorted.’

Little Hereford is a collection of houses and a couple of pubs that lies fifteen minutes’ drive east of Rushpool in the valley of the River Teme. My GPS turned me off the main road just before I reached the stone bridge and past an orchard to the Westbury Caravan Park. It was a touring park, which meant that it catered for the kind of caravans that people use to clog up the roads in the summer and not the aluminium house substitutes with the suspiciously vestigial wheels. The nice white lady in the camp office looked up from her paperwork and asked if she could help me.

I told her that I was there to meet a Miss Teveyddyadd.

She gave me a broad grin that was slightly worrying in its fervour.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘You’re here to see the blessed sisters.’

I said that I was rather afraid I was, and she gave me directions.

The plots were laid out on neat rectangles of lawn between shaggy olive-green hedges. As I crunched down the gravel access drive I could see heat haze wavering over the white aluminium tops of the caravans. A huge half-naked white man, his belly an alarming lobster colour, dozed in a black and white striped deckchair under a porch awning. In front of the next caravan an elderly couple in matching yellow sun hats sat side by side, drinking tea and listening to The Archers on a digital radio.

A fat bumblebee meandered humming past my ear – I gave it a suspicious look, but it ignored me and headed off towards the fat man. Maybe it thought he was an aubergine.

Ahead I could hear high pitched yells and screams – the sound of children playing. Beyond a five-bar gate was what Nightingale insists on calling a sward, an area of naturally short grass, dotted with trees and picnic tables, edged with a steep bank that led to the river. There was a scatter of adults sat at the picnic tables or in the shade of the trees, but the children were all down in the water. Here the river was over ten metres across but shallow enough that I could see the smooth green stones of its bed. I watched from the bank as the kids thrashed around in the water – a froth of bright tropical blue, purples and yellows and distressingly pale limbs. Although I did notice at least one mixed-race boy amongst the others.

I had a sudden urge to pull off my boots and socks, roll up my trousers and go for a paddle.

‘Stop that,’ I said out loud.