Sophy does not wear a bra, but she has one of those figures that still looks pretty good, regardless of how effectively she shrouds it in widow’s weeds.

‘No of course she’s not, darling,’ I say. ‘She’s a sort of magician.’

We spend half an hour or so pulping leaves and sniffing essences and learning about the properties of various herbs, while Spike reads, on his bed, a Just William book from the mobile library occasionally laughing out loud, which makes me think what a nice boy he must be.

At 12.50 the session ends, after the ‘work party’, during which bladder campion, catnip, lavender, borage, dill, hyssop, lemon balm, thyme, lovage and rue have all been identified and rubbed between thumb and forefinger to release what Sophy, sniffing deeply, her eyes closed in ecstasy, describes as their ‘individual signature scents’.

Even though the children, after an hour, are all sighing, rolling their eyes and begging to go, even my usually biddable Posy, I, for one, feel tremendous. As if I have, definitely, connected with nature. I feel in my waters how right I am to have taken the children away from the materialist society of West London. I have removed my children from the society of other children who announce at circle time that they had been bought flats in Lansdowne Road/inherited huge lump sums/just returned from eco-safari or the Maldives (a part of the Notting Hill curriculum which Ralph used to call ‘show off and tell’). I have removed them from the posse of pushy mothers, who ferry their over-stimulated, force-fed, privately educated and additionally tutored children from violin to philosophy group to chess tournament simply so their offspring, bristling with extracurricular add-ons like Grade 8 lute, catch the eye of the admissions tutor at Eton.

And I have elevated them to a community where children learn about herbs, read Just William and eat gluten-free honey-sweetened cookies in yurts.

I exhale with satisfaction, thinking that I am giving my children a chance, a once in a lifetime chance not to be serial consumers of the digital age, a chance to be bored, a chance to invent games, breathe the fresh air of West Dorset, and whatnot. Indeed, I almost feel able to attend Sophy’s next workshop on biodynamic composting. But not quite. Not yet. You can take the girl away from Notting Hill… ‘I wish I could come to it, Sophy, but I think I have… another commitment that day,’ I say, as if I am meeting Gordon Brown to discuss the state of the union. ‘But, is there anything you’d like, Sophy? Anything you need? I’d love to be able to give you something, you know, back…’ I swell with deep self-love, and am filled with a rush of emotion that I normally get only when I take all my empties and cardboard and newspapers to the household waste place in Larcombe Ducis, to recycle them ethically.