To begin with, though, I say to Mimi, getting it off my chest straightaway, how sad it is that we’ve turned out like every other married couple, with our strengths having become our weaknesses, and the exact things we previously used to find charming and attractive, we now find irritating.

Mimi isn’t interested in the fact that our marriage is as awful as everyone else’s, but she does perk up at the mention of the log.

‘Oh, that! That’s an old country-house trick,’ she tells me. She speaks as if I had never stayed at a country-house weekend, as if I had never experienced the joys of forty-eight hours in which everyone tucks into huge fried breakfasts before going out to kill things, or plays vicious games of croquet, gossips about their mutual friends, namedrops so loudly you can hear it in the next county, and then passes out in freezing bedrooms after late-night drinking jags of whisky and playing Freda, a lethal but much loved upper-class icebreaker of a game which demands all age groups run at high speed round and round the full-size billiards table instead of talking to each other. The whisky and the Freda are essential tools of survival in country houses, being the only two things that stop guests freezing to death, of course.

One of the nice things about having our own lovely place in the country, lovely enough to have featured in Dorset Living, House and Garden, and I hope, eventually, Gardens Illustrated, is that it completely kills the desire to stay in anyone else’s lovely place in the country. I can’t stand the fact that guests, even sensitive ones, are expected to play ghastly after-dinner games, requiring me to go and hide somewhere remote, like the icehouse or the pets’ graveyard, until it’s safely over, which is usually not for hours.

‘If you’re staying in someone’s house, a big one, and they don’t have much help, the key thing is to avoid being given tasks to do by your hostess,’ Mimi confides, ‘so you carry a log purposefully from room to room, as if you are in the middle of nobly building a roaring blaze for everyone. See, if a hostess has a big house, lots of friends, she’ll never generally speaking have enough help, she quite understandably wants guests to earn their keep, and will treat them as unpaid Gastarbeiter.’

Mimi then tells me all about various friend-rich, staff-poor friends of hers who wait till they have huge house parties before deciding to move all the furniture around, assemble four-posters, clear out attics, or suddenly bray that the ‘team’ must earn their keep by removing rocks from some field on the estate, so the hosts can erect a marquee or something.

‘But Pierre isn’t ligging in some remote Scottish pile like some awful castle-climber,’ I point out to Mimi, when she’s finished. ‘He’s in his own home, where he should be pitching in without complaint, and pulling his weight. Far from pitching in, he creates more work. Did I ever tell you about the rivers of jam episode, when I was making jam, and he insisted I help him find something he accused me of moving, so I left him in the kitchen for a second and when I came back the whole saucepan of boiling jam where I was bubbling off the scum –’