I know that we are always being told to be happy with what we have, and I am: Home Farm is dear and cosy, not to mention all we can afford. But after spending any time at Court Place, or any other vast pile, I always feel a slight shrinkage when I return home and step over a huge pile of muddy wellies and coats simply in order to gain access to my own kitchen, and it begins to feel as if we are living all jammed together in a hovel rather than in a highly desirable period farmhouse in one of the most beautiful places in the entire universe.

I feel like crying, ‘Hold on! Where’s the greenhouse, the market garden, the walled garden, the rose garden? There’s been a mistake! Where are the stables and the stable girls, the butler, the housekeeper, the keeper’s cottage and the lodge, not to mention the loose-box, the ornamental lake, and the ha-ha?’

The feeling, this Court Place-itis, soon passes, of course, but it does make me wonder whether anyone is free from these feelings, which do one no credit at all, whereby those who have a sweet-faced cottage envy those who have a spacious vicarage who envy those who have a Jacobean manor who envy those who have a Tudor hall who envy those who have an Elizabethan mini-stately who envy those who have a stately who envy those who have an Edwardian palace. It makes me wonder that the rich only think and worry about those who are even richer than them.

I do know that in the cut-throat world of gardens and gardeners, the turf wars are hotting up even faster than the upper atmosphere, especially since City traders – thanks to nurseries all over Europe – can buy an estate and have it turned into a landscaped woodland ‘park’ within a matter of months, given enough money and the right designer. And while those who have a vegetable patch dream of a walled garden, those with walled gardens grind their teeth to discover that someone else’s walled garden is designed by Tom Stuart-Smith, or Michael Balston, and so on and so on, ad infinitum.

The truth is, someone else has always got more and better than them, and this is what drives men on to acquire; it’s the making of money not the money itself that becomes important and addictive. This is why billionaires like to carry on making money till they drop dead of heart attacks on their private jets, en route to inspect the submarine attached to the new super-yacht.