No one stirs. ‘It’s never for me,’ says Ralph, ‘I’m not answering it. It’s always some member of your family, Mimi. Con or your mother or someone.’ It’s true, when the telephone rings, it is always for me, but then I come from a large gabby Irish family, and he comes from the English upper classes, who think that communication (except with animals) is vulgar and prefer only to ring if there’s some bad news to impart.

At this provocation I decide I’m not answering it either. So we let it ring.

I’m looking at an email from Cath, which she has sent me in reply to my call last week, before she went off to yet another of her houses in super-prime locations, this one a château in Switzerland, taking Rose and Pierre. I’d called her to fillet her unashamedly for 1. contacts and addresses and so on, 2. ideas re: the menu and drinks, and 3. help if not necessarily financial assistance, for Ralph’s garden-lunch thing. For his fortieth.

‘I’m loving the déjeuner sur l’herbe concept!’ she wrote, after I roughed out verbally my plan for a picnic in the garden, possibly with people sitting on rugs spread around the orchard, in other words, a completely low-key, low-budget event.

‘I’m a bit busy with the wedding at the moment, and May is only a hop, skip and a jump away,’ she had written merrily, ‘but I’d run with a Venetian theme, that always works well’ – I loved the ‘always’ there – ‘with waiters dressed like gondoliers, and I can lend you the Court Place farm shop chef! Giancarlo! He’s from Bologna – he did my Parmesan risotto. Do you remember?’

Indeed I did.

I have already told Cath how wonderful it is that Serena and Colin are getting married, although, as Ralph drily puts it, one can quite see why he might want to marry her, but not why she might want to marry him.

‘They’re in love!’ I cried. ‘It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.’

‘They’re children,’ he answered, ‘and she must be in pig.’

I haven’t dared ask Cath why her oldest daughter is getting married in such a rush, because I heard it was something to do with Cath wanting to have the wedding in the garden at its Chelsea Flower Show apogee of perfection, at the silkiest time of year.

‘He can do you antipasti. And Giancarlo can also do a main course, he’s excellent with fish, I’m thinking line-caught wild Cornish sea bass baked with herbs and rock salt, something simple – as a dry run for the wedding, when we have to seat 250.’