‘Except for vos seins, your breasts, Catherine,’ Virginie interrupts with a wicked look, and her hands flutter above her own pert chest. Virginie is complimenting Cath on the fact that her breasts are all her own! I decide she is a little drunk. ‘It eez such a plaizhair to see an American woman, from ze west coast, who does not ’ave all ze work. Vraiment, ze women in LA – I nevair saw one grey ‘air, and zair faces, zay look’ – Virginie pauses, shakes her head, as if lost for words – ‘as if zay ’ave been in a terreeble ’ouse fire.’

‘I’m glad you think I’m ageing gracefully, Virginie,’ says Cath. ‘From you, that is praise indeed. I just can’t be bothered with plastic surgery. To me, it’s like all the folks who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge – a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But back to the shop. Organic certification, as I was saying. It’s way too complicated, if you want a café and a shop combined. So I’m going local. The Court Place farm shop is going off the reservation here. We’re going to provide organic produce and so on, but everyone’s hip to that now, so here’s the kicker. I’m going to serve it up at prices even locals can afford. I know our prices have been a little… punchy’ (I almost say ‘exorbitant’ but manage to bite my tongue), ‘so the new deal is, no mark-ups, no food miles. Everybody will be able to buy my sausages now, not just Virginie.’

Everyone claps as if all we worry about, too, is the ethics of a farm shop at which a steel magnate, or Russian oligarch, arrives by helicopter, spends £8 on some carrots and £1,500 on a cashmere dressing gown and choppers back to London, squirting kerosene straight into the ozone layer.

The baron raises his glass. ‘To Madame Cobb,’ he announces, ‘the Queen Bee of Honeyborne. Long may she reign over us.’

Everyone laughs as if the baron had executed a dazzling wordplay, and toasts Cath energetically. After all, it has been a long hard morning of at least three red runs. And then we’d had a fairly liquid lunch and penne à la Geoffrey, as in Geoffrey Moore, the son of Roger Moore, and raclette at a private club where the pecking order of tables was more complex than the parking precedence of horse-boxes at a Pony Club polo match.