The guests arrive, and are given Bellinis by the children (‘Venice in a glass!’ Cath bubbles when she takes hers from Ry). They mingle, and stroll, and the hubbub rises. Luckily, it is a balmy spring day, the little white clouds pass the sun quickly and the garden is bathed in a buttery radiance, and daisies and daffodils are showing their little white and yellow faces in the lush green grass. We’ve put the marquee between the orchard and the paddock, but drinks are on the lawn (well, the shaggy bit of grass between the paddock and the farmhouse where we sometimes lie on rugs when it’s not raining, and Cas plays football).

It is all going swimmingly. Even Ralph is circulating or, at any rate, Ralph has found the one guest who is also a fellow member of the Piscatorial Society, and is chatting to him animatedly in order to repel any other approaches, any advance from someone who retired from the City aged forty-five and has started his own fund and who seeks out Ralph to tell him without Ralph asking (my husband is unmoved by money) that ‘It’s really doing rather well, actually.’

Then Posy bangs the gong, and everyone tries to find their names on the seating plan tacked to a child’s wooden easel that I have established at the entrance of the marquee. This takes ages, as no one has their glasses, and there is much wandering around with cries of ‘Is this table six? Am I on table six, darling? Can’t read a thing! I haven’t got my glasses! Darling, where are my glasses? Where’s table six?’

Finally, everyone takes their seats, and the gondoliers – i.e. Court Place staff borrowed for the occasion – wheel through the tables with plates laden with antipasti and uncork Chianti with popping sounds and pour it into Cath Cobb’s unparalleled and extensive collection of Murano glasses in jewel colours. The players from Godminster Opera, supplied by Ned and Lulu, sing hair-lifting arias from Puccini and Verdi.

I am hugging myself with the triumph of it all.

‘You’ve done a marvellous job on the tent,’ people keep saying to me, as they eat their marinated peppers and baby mozzarrella and salami starters, on platters, and drizzle olive oil from baby bottles placed at each table. I nod modestly. In fact, Cath has done a marvellous job on the tent.

There are swags of pink roses tied around the struts… brightly coloured cotton shirts and striped tea-towels are strung from washing lines as if we are in the alleys of the Dorsoduro… table decorations in the shape of papier-mâché gondolas… ironic outsize pepper mills… it is warm under canvas, and the sun has come out, making it warmer. I close my eyes, take a long sip of my second Bellini, and feel the bonhomie rise in me like the acqua alta lapping the pavements of Venice.