In the Stores, Mrs Hitchens is in full flow, standing behind the till, ringing up baskets containing clotted cream, Marigold gloves, Astonish cleaning products, bottles of Badgers ale, local milk, cheese, butter, eggs, chocolate. ‘I can’t wait until this becomes a community shop,’ she’s saying, to the usual captive audience of people waiting to pay. (Mrs Hitchens has staged a miracle recovery from the news that the Post Office will no longer receive a subsidy, and claims to be right behind Cath’s plans to turn it into a collective.) ‘Can’t happen soon enough for me,’ she asserts. ‘If I wasn’t stood here, on my two feet all day, I could have been up at Court Place, with all the posh guests.’

She sniffs, and rings up some Astonish oven cream cleaner, in a tub, on the till. Mrs Hitchens must have heard the helicopter too, and had presumably done a brisk trade in hot pasties to dark-suited heavies talking into their necks.

Even though Mrs Hitchens hasn’t left the shop for a second, she is of course among the first to know the full import of Gwenda’s epiphany. As we wait our turn, she is losing no time in imparting the salient details to Debbie from the pub, who has nipped in before the evening rush for sunflower oil for the pub’s extensive repertoire of fried foods.

‘So, the secret’s finally out,’ she says to Debbie, as she rings up the sunflower oil, and I wait patiently behind her in the queue, worrying about Serena. A bit of a shock for Sir Michael, eh? Not surprising that he decided to have a heart attack rather than face the wedding on the arm of Lady E.’

Debbie looks bemused, an expression Mrs Hitchens reads with satisfaction, as it means she is the first to impart the news that will be round the village like brushfire by the time the last guests, Champagne-sozzled and weary, have left the parish.

‘Funny to think that the son Sir Michael never had… turned out to be Colin Watts, isn’t it?’ says Mrs Hitchens, placing the plastic bottle of oil into a crumpled plastic bag and withdrawing Debbie’s few pence in change with a triumphant ting of the cash register. ‘Will that be all for now, Debbie?’

Mimi

‘Sorry, Hogget, you’re what?’ asks Ralph.

Ralph has taken to calling me Hogget, as he says I have reached that ‘plump and juicy’ stage of womanhood that is ‘no longer lamb but not yet mutton’. His eye flickers from the open box of dry flies that is lying tantalizingly on the kitchen table, next to Mirabel’s iPod, several sections of the Saturday Telegraph, the Bridgewater butter dish saying BUTTER in black capitals full of bright yellow butter, a fat block of sunshine, and a Cornishware jug filled with a posy of late snowdrops and tooting daffodils.