I am hotdesking at the kitchen table, working out the placement for guests, who will all be seated at round tables in the marquee, which I can see now out of the kitchen window, its rigging flapping gently in the breeze.

Ralph is looking white. Bad timing, I’m afraid. He’s had a call from Number 10 asking him to write a piece for Monday’s Guardian - well, not under his name but, as it were, signed by Gordon Brown, which is apparently what happens: all those pieces by Cameron and Blair and so on are written either by speechwriters, or by random experts, but never by Cameron or Brown or Blair.

‘What’s the piece about?’ I ask. I feel I am the journalist of the family, even though my writing career is now confined to 150-word articles on spelt therapies at spas, i.e. not exactly Pulitzer-level.

‘Implications of oil and gas becoming a security issue not a resource issue,’ he says, as I try to stifle a yawn (it’s a reflex whenever Ralph talks about his work; it’s rude, but I can’t help it). ‘No, not one for you, my love. Can I use your laptop, darling? I left mine in London.’

‘Can’t you use Mirabel’s?’ I say. ‘I am trying to do the placement for eighty.’

‘I suppose I could,’ Ralph says. ‘I’ll try telling her that I am writing the article for the Prime Minister, and see if that carries any weight with her, which I rather doubt.’

Dear Ralph is trying to put a brave face on today’s ordeal. He’s wearing the blue shirt we bought in Venice that exactly matches the colour of his eyes, a pair of Cordings moleskins, and the Lobbs brogues we stole off the Guy back in Lonsdale Gardens before it went on to the November 5th bonfire and, when I remember to look at him, I mean really look at him, I think he’s the best-looking man anywhere.

But he still needs hours of tenderizing, like a tough steak before a barbie, before he sees any of his old friends (and to qualify as an old friend in Ralph’s circles, you have to have known someone at least since the age of eight, so his old friends are Crusty, Harry and Fucker from prep school – Sunningdale, of course). So he is exuding dread at the arrival later today of several dozen new friends as well as old muckers he tolerates not because he likes them – but because he’s known them all his life.