Trying to look environmentally concerned I say it’s oil, but that we are, actually, thinking of converting it to a bio-fuel in the near future. Which is a white lie, of course.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he says, holds up his palm to me. ‘You know, it really matters that where I work as well as where I live people are at least trying to do the right thing.’ His palm is still aloft, and I finally get it.

‘High five!’ I say, sounding silly, and place my hand against his, where it looks pleasingly small and girlish. I’m not sure what ‘high five’ is or whether this is what I should be saying at this point, but it doesn’t matter.

As our palms touch, I feel a crackling tingle of electricity pass between us and – I know this sounds odd – but I sort of lose consciousness for a second. I find myself just staring at him, but after that he just drinks his coffee quite quickly, grabs a handful of shortbread from the enamel tin, an apple and a banana from the fruit bowl, and says he’s going off to the barns to see how many hampers we have left in storage.

I wave and then sort of collapse at the kitchen table, holding my mug with its untouched coffee.

After a while I wander into the study. I can’t concentrate. I have to stop myself from rushing out to the barns, and seeing… if Jesse Marlon felt it too, whether such a current of electricity, apparently passing between two people, can only be experienced by one… I force myself to do some paperwork, and open my emails instead.

They are all boring apart from a strange one, from a woman who’d found my name on the internet on the EatDorset site after reading the piece in Country Living. I say ‘a woman’, as if I don’t know her, but I do, only when I knew Clare, she was called something else, she wasn’t called Clare Sturgis but Clare Lowell and we were at Cambridge together, on the same staircase in our first year, when I was reading Modern Languages and, I think, she was reading English.

In her email, she apologizes for coming over all Friends Reunited but says she is keen to see me again and catch up, because our life journeys seem to be following similar paths. Now she’s a garden designer, but taking a break from her clients, and looking to explore lots of options. She wants to come and see me at the Dairy, and says she is really interested in the potential cross-marketing opportunities of smallholdings, stuff like physick gardens and homeopathy as well as consumables.

She mentions en passant she is also going to see Sarah Raven at Perch Hill, so of course I feel very flattered to be mentioned in the same breath as the Queen of Cutting Gardens, and tell her in a long, welcoming email back that I’d love to see her any time. And I tell Clare Sturgis/Lowell to bring her little baby – Joe – with her, if she likes.