So now I’ve got an au pair, even if she does only say, intermittently, ‘Yes?’

Who on earth is she going to hang out with in Honeyborne? I am wondering, mainly so that I am not her only friend, and then I remember – Colin Watts! The wood guy. The tall son of Thos. Watts the butcher, adopted I think, who drives around in that white van that says, Colin Watts, Logs, Kindling and Bark on the side, which the children think is so funny. He’s young, he’s tall and he’s got longish legs; he’s always in the pub. He’s single. He’s got a pulse. In other words, he will most certainly do.

I am so excited at matchmaking Ana with Colin Watts that I almost celebrate by making an impulse purchase of a ‘pack-away TV blanket’, which folds into a cushion with a handy pocket. It costs a bargain price of only £19.95. To use during all the downtime I am clearly not going to have now I have help.

I am staring hard at the picture in the newspaper of the woman in the ad, waiting for the endorphin rush that will make me pick up the telephone and order it. She is sitting on a spotless cream sofa next to a cheese plant, entirely swaddled head-to-toe in blue microfibre. Her feet are, we are invited to imagine, tucked into the sort of flap at the bottom and there are TV guides, spectacles, remote controls sticking out from pockets around her waist, so she looks like a bit like a Home Counties suicide bomber in a burqa. I am trying to imagine me in the pack-away TV blanket while Ana gets on with the laundry, or picks apples with Posy, or me out and about doing something for myself, and am failing somehow. Now I have Ana to take charge of what she calls ‘the houseworks’, I could, in theory, get out more, and do something.

But what, and where?

If you don’t ride and aren’t a keen gardener, there’s less to do in Honeyborne than in Open Prison. In prison, at least inmates never have a minute free, inundated as they are with pleasant, ‘intramural’ activities: craft classes, salsa lessons, computer courses, help with CVs, professional-level theatre workshops run by concerned, compassionate actors, and so on, not to mention Italian cultural days where they eat gnocchi and tiramisu prepared by gorgeous Giorgio Locatelli or someone while being serenaded by tenors.

For a start, the only shop here for miles around, apart from the Post Office, is the aforementioned one called Horse Supplies.

Horse Supplies and Saddlery – to give it its full name –provides us with the only retail opportunity for miles around. It has a concrete floor, hardcore, noticeboard pinned up with job ads for poultry sexers, pignuts, chainlinks – that sort of thing –and possibly ranks as the least glamorous outlet in the western world, but I rather love it.

Even when I allow myself to dwell on what ‘shopping’ used to be like.