Luckily, Ry, the new au pair boy, is so far perfect in every way, but he is no less than 6 feet 5 inches tall, a fact I failed to elicit during our communications by email. This means he can only move about in Home Farm at a crouch, bent double, which daily reminds me and Ralph that our new abode is a former peasant hovel where Dorset yeoman farmers lived cheek by jowl with their own cows and sheep. In fact, Biddy Pike showed me an ancient black and white picture of the kitchen of Home Farm in the 1930s, and there were orphan lambs nestling on burlap sacks all over the kitchen floor, in a part of the house she called the shippon. The picture made me cry (again – hormones are all over the shop) and Posy almost expire with excitement and make me promise to provide her with a baby lamb to replace Trumpet, who is as I speak happily thundering about the indoor school at Honeyborne Stables on his tiny hooves.

Ry’s only been here a week but he has already achieved godlike status, as he has promised to teach Cas how to surf and Posy how to skateboard and Mirabel how to download iTunes on her mobile, so the children and I, at least, are thrilled.

I am trying to work out how to mix up my guests, who all fall into separate socio-economic categories. There’re the second-homers. There’s the Notting Hill crowd. I can’t for the life of me work out how to mingle old money, new money and no money and, above all, I have no idea how to distribute the locals.

‘It’s horrid when people have to seat themselves,’ I say out loud, ‘buffet-style. There’s nothing worse. Panic sets in when it comes to sitting and it all becomes like a game of musical chairs as everyone rushes to find the people they already know before the table fills up and they’re stuck on the children’s table or next to someone’s deaf great-aunt.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mimi,’ says Ralph. ‘If you try to work out where everyone sits, you’ll only get it wrong, and The Village will regard you as a terrible snob and climber. Just let everyone get on with it.’

But I am sitting here, worrying. Though I love them more than life itself and depend on my neighbours for fuel, whisky, gossip, tyre pumps, baby lambs, lifts to Godminster, important information such as which Saturday in August is the fête, and which weekend the entire village gathers together to chase an eight-pound wheel of Godminster Cheddar down Hamble Hill, or makes rafts to race each other at Larmouth, there is no question that The Village does need some… mixing up.