Inside, it is warm and cosy. The walls have been covered in cob and painted white. There is a pine floor, a double bunk, and Indian rugs on the floor. Some chipped china mugs and plates sit in a pine rack. A Lazy Susan encircles some organic Whole Earth ketchup, Grey Poupon mustard, an earthenware pot with sugar, a bowl of Maldon salt, a pepper mill, and other slightly sticky condiment-containers, all of which attest to the very human need to have not a room of one’s own, but a kitchen.

An iPod sits on the worktop next to it, a lead running to a three-point plug that links the house’s wiring to the solar panels and the wind generator on the hill.

Although mid-morning light seeps through the picture window above the kitchen sink, I am sprawled – that’s the only word – on a fake fur throw by the open fire. Not a stitch on. I could be in my Egyptian cotton super-kingsize bed with its patchwork quilt, underneath my grouped collection of Dutch eighteenth-century still lifes of fruit and flowers in gilt frames on the wall, alongside chintzy bedside tables covered with really good knick-knacks, the chaise-longue I’ve just recovered in striped linen farmer’s sacks at the foot of the bed. But I’m not. I have abandoned all of that good taste and hot water and comfort – for the altogether more dazzling richness of this.

I can feel my long hair sweep over my shoulders and caress my small breasts, and I know that my body gleams rosy in the firelight, like the inside of a cowrie shell.

Jesse Marlon has come in, and instead of making straight for me, is boiling water for tea. This takes ages, as he is having to feed small logs that were hewn by hand into the open mouth of the woodburning stove. But then, everything in Spodden’s Hatch takes ages. A meal can take up to three hours, just the prepping. The stove squats fatly on the wooden planked floor of the dwelling; it has a flat round iron top, on which the kettle sits.

I wondered about the kettle but decided that it doesn’t matter having the occasional cup of tea made with water boiled in an ancient, aluminium kettle, possibly risking early Alzheimer’s. I’m having too much fun rediscovering sex and remembering with surprise how much I once actually liked it. Especially if this rediscovery is assisted by a young, ardent and, above all, bewilderingly ‘considerate’ lover (this is the euphemism I have decided I will use when I reveal to Mimi the young Jesse Marlon’s delightful enthusiasm for orally returning the compliment).

Jesse Marlon is wearing a turquoise and white striped kikoi around his narrow hips and some leather-soled Afghan knitted slipper socks that still smell slightly of sick, as all leather-soled knitted Afghan slipper socks do.