There are meat-free sloppy meals heavy on cheap grains and pulses, like quinoa and mung beans, to be prepared.

This morning, over dandelion tea, I asked Jesse Marlon what was on the agenda, apart from the biomass boiler. I asked as if I really cared, and he recited it – whether the vegan members should be required to milk the cows, whether they should inseminate the sow, how to massacre slugs. I rather regretted asking – after all, Jesse Marlon should by rights be there, with Sophy and co., rather than with me.

As he spoke I couldn’t help dwelling on my agenda and packing for the ski-trip tomorrow. Skiing is a tough one, and I can’t pack until I’ve decided my look for the slopes at Gstaad: will it be snowboarder/baggy/technical, or English alpinist circa 1939 in Murren, with a chunky knit and stirrup pants and thick, black hairband?

As I worry about my ski outfits, and après-ski wear, I realize how differently I live from the Spodders. They spend much of the day moving about on their forty acres of Bryanston land, pulling at it, poking it, picking at it, as if it were a scab on the face of the planet. They eat communally, at around six thirty, although the parents feed their children earlier if they like. Jesse Marlon says they’re always ravenous after long days in the open air, not to mention long, long nights in the pitchy gloom of their smoky, homemade habitations of wood and canvas and straw.

During hours of darkness, the dwellings are dimly lit, if at all, by the orange glow of one low-energy light bulb each, an electricity supply that depends on there being wind and sun, two elements that cannot be continuously guaranteed in a deep cleeve of the Lar river valley in the middle of west Dorset many months before the summer solstice.

This rainy winter, the single spindly wind generator set on the steep hill next to the old gibbet stopped hissing and spinning. As the solar panels’ black faces could absorb no rays of light at all, the Spodders had no electricity for days on end.

I know that, across the damp earth, a few booted paces away, Sophy is in her little yurt, or will be soon. It is one she has built by hand. She’ll be tending Noah the baby, with Spike at school, and preparing those vegan salves and hand-creams and lip balms made from herbs, groundsel and cowslips and yellow dock that she gathers and dries and sorts and packages herself, writing out the labels on each little pot in her scratchy copperplate pen, and then flogging them in Cath’s farm shop.