Poor Sophy. No money, and always busy, especially since the unexpected arrival of baby Noah eight months ago, twelve years after the planned arrival of Spike, who’s in the same year at Acland’s as Ceci and Mirabel. ‘A happy accident,’ is all she said to me, by the communal kitchen. (It’s her turn to cook tonight, so I asked what was on the menu. Nettle soup, mung bean stew – yum!)

I peeped in on her again, about twenty minutes ago, to give her the groundnut oil she’d asked for.

Baby Noah was placidly sitting in a grubby ski-suit on the floor, occasionally finding something small enough to push testingly up his nose, or scooting across to the table to gnaw a leg (teething, according to his mum).

Sophy was at the table, potting gunk. She really does believe her tinctures and salves work and, even more scary, she believes that her faith in her pastes and potions is what does the trick.

‘The people who come from this land, whose sickness comes from this land, should be treated by herbs from this land,’ I’ve heard her explain to visiting journalists who come to write articles about Spodden’s Hatch. Loads come, to view those who walk the walk on the low-impact lifestyle and subsistence living. It’s inevitable, I suppose, the press interest. As global warming threatens the importing of food and a future in which we will all have to dig for Britain again and never see a Kenyan green bean or a Spanish strawberry looms, glossy spreads about Spodden’s Hatch have become a crunchy regular staple (like toasted rye flakes in muesli) of the weekend supplements.

Sophy believes her creams and potions work better because ‘the right sort of energy has been used in the making of them, the pure energy of healing, untainted by oil or machinery’. When asked, she will reveal that her cottage industry brings in about £20 a week, which makes me feel guiltily well off. Twenty pounds! It sounds like nothing. It would be a small piece of Cheddar, some gardening gloves, and a latte and some granola in Court Place farm shop but, in fact, it is enough to pay her sub to the community, a pot that stretches to buying food and shoeing the horse, and keeps her and the two boys for a week.

Thank God Jesse Marlon’s house is at the edge of the settlement, on higher ground, furthest away from the Lar (the higher up the house, the drier the ground). It is made of straw bales, with frames of larch, and sits on a bed of tyres. Jesse Marlon built it, all by himself, he tells me. He calls it his greatest achievement to date.