‘Golly, you’re Dorset’s answer to Martha Stewart,’ Mimi says, as she breaks the flapjack in two and takes the nice crunchy half for herself, leaving me the flabby bit. ‘You’re a one-woman cottage industry. Remind me not to tell Ralph. He’s been muttering about me retraining as a country solicitor and us getting an au pair, so I can pull my weight again.’

She munches away.

‘Did I tell you, I went into the Stores to see if Mrs Hitchens could help, about my cleaner crisis?’

I shake my head, enjoying the fact that, with Mimi, everything is a drama and a crisis.

‘She merely sighed and opened a drawer under the till. It was like this, you know, dog-eared piece of A4, absolutely covered with scribble, she’s obviously had going for ages. So she added my name to the list of those in the area who have needed cleaners for much longer than me, i.e. not just for months, but decades.’

I keep quiet, obviously, because I have a cleaner, Joan, and Mimi knows I have a cleaner, but our relationship has not and may to be honest never reach the point where I will make the ultimate sacrifice and allow my cleaner to work for her. After all, I barely dare ask Joan to work for me, and I’ve been paying her ten years. And even Mimi knows that even so much as humbly and nervously suggesting I provide her with Joan’s number would be too much to ask. So she doesn’t.

‘So I just say, “What a good idea, darling,” every time the au pair idea comes up,’ Mimi continues, ‘like I do when he talks about renting a cottage on Dartmoor for half-term, because I know that if I don’t do it, it won’t actually happen. But I don’t want to, you know, sound totally neg every time he suggests we actually do anything.’

‘But why would you want to rent a cottage on Dartmoor when you’ve just bought a gorgeous old farmhouse in the wilds of west Dorset?’ I ask, pleased that we have swept on past the cleaner issue. ‘I mean, you’re surrounded by beautiful landscape here, and, er, friends. Why would you leave all that to pay a lot of money to go to some cottage in the rain with polycotton sheets and nasty thin pillows with no dishwasher? Anyway, don’t you want to do the house up a bit first, concentrate on getting it, er, right, rather than spend the money on renting somewhere else?’ I don’t want to say that Home Farm is a complete wreck, obviously, but it does need some poshing up, I mean, the truth is that Honeyborne is absolutely full of photoshoot-ready country spreads, with trugs and hide gloves artfully arrayed on oak ledges in greenhouses, cutting gardens full of colour and bloom, manicured lawns, wildflower meadows, ancient wisteria-clad period dwellings awash with stone floors, sumptuous bathrooms and sprawling flagstone-floored country kitchens replete with batterie de cuisine, working fireplaces and bread ovens. While Home Farm is still defiantly unmodernized – I don’t think they’ve even got central heating, let alone more than one bathroom – which the Flemings appear content to regard as part of its charm.