‘But Pierre is in his own home, Rose,’ Mimi interrupts, taking something out of her bag. Oh my God – she lays them face down on the table, so all I can see is a picture of an oiled torso and a pair of white swimming trunks containing a bulging crotch thrusting forwards out of the picture that is the latest Dolce and Gabbana aftershave ad. My heart sinks.

But I don’t ask yet. I can’t exactly say this to Mimi – even though we are past the stage of pretending to each other that we have perfect lives and are still deeply in love with our husbands, we haven’t properly begun to share yet – but everything about Pierre is beginning to grate.

Everything I used to love. His fisherman’s smock. His hands grimed with clay, him being ‘artistic’, even his name, which I used to find terribly attractive, even hip.

Now all these things make me feel cross. Why didn’t his pretentious parents from Biggleswade call him Peter? It’s not as if he’s French.

Some of this spills out to Mimi.

‘He is in his home, but I’m the only one at the Dairy who works,’ I point out, when our coffees finally arrive, after much hissing and jetting of milk and steam, slopping over the sides of the cups. I mop the table and set the cup on the napkin, while Mimi brings hers straight to her lips, and sups without noticing that foamy brown liquid is coursing down the side, and on to the table. I go up to the counter, looking bleakly at the cakes and things underneath glass at the front, wish for a second that I was tempted, and take a few napkins from the pile.

Apart from a man with a collie and a woman in a headscarf with a Labrador and a terrier, both reading the Daily Telegraph, we are That New Place’s only customers.

‘Not him. I’m the main breadwinner, and I do all the gardening, the cooking, the shopping, the childcare,’ I say, rejoining Mimi. ‘You know, my jams and chutneys are doing really well, so are my hampers – Waitrose Food Illustrated has just done a thing on them, so has the Observer Food Monthly, which is great. I don’t know if you know this, but I do the labels, the khaki-and-plum ones, handwritten, for those tall, thin flavoured vodkas. And then I’m doing the air-dried slices of apples and pears idea I mentioned as an alternative to crisps. I may even be bringing out my own cheese next year.’

I don’t know why it all gushed out, not all of it is even strictly true – the bit about the cheese is definitely somewhat premature. I do want to produce my own cheese, as cheese is not only milk’s leap to immortality, it’s a lovely way of showing how connected to the terroir one is, and one of my biggest worries at the moment is that Cath will unveil her Honeyborne Blue or her Court Place Cheddar before I do.