4. You must never venture outside unless you are accompanied by a dog or astride a horse. If you do, you will be taken for a poacher or, even worse, a rambler, and probably shot, and your body will be hung from the gibbet as a public warning to others.

5. You must drive a battered green Land Rover at warp speed in steep-sided, narrow lanes with blind corners, howling drunk. Your dog, preferably a collie, must be in the passenger’s seat with its head hanging out of the window and tongue whipping in the tailwind. In the back you must keep an assortment of leads, tools and bales of hay, and you must affix a Countryside Alliance sticker by the licence plate.

6. You must welcome all dogs into your house, wet or dry, and make endless allowances when other people’s dogs, who they love infinitely more than their spouses or children, pee on sofas or maul babies. Remember, dogs come first, and it is never, ever, the dog’s fault.

7. If engaged in conversation, you must avoid topics, such as work or Westminster or culture, which mark you out as a townie, and focus entirely on television, hunting, the weather, holidays, the harvest and the decline in rural bus services. You must join in with gusto when a farmer brings up scab/scrapie/staggers/spangles or other veterinary conditions at village dos. When someone says ‘the other day’, you must not look surprised when it turns out he is referring to a famous incident, often involving ferrets, that happened in the middle of the last century, and must nod knowledgeably when your interlocutor talks about farrowing or whelping.

8. Even though you have moved to the country to escape built-up areas, and for the views, you must support publicly those who want to carpet National Parks and the nation’s few remaining areas of outstanding natural beauty with hideous, low-cost housing for locals, with satellite dishes invariably affixed. You must join in the loud complaints about how second-homers have driven up rural house prices, making country living completely unaffordable unless you work in town.

9. When the hunt churns up your meadows and breaks your gates down, you must rush out with a beaming smile bearing stirrup-cup and sweetly offer doubles all round.

10. So, unless you want to be taken for an incomer, a rich townie, whose gates are made of clean-limbed new pine and clip shut thanks to oiled latches, metal spigots and hinges, which of course I don’t, you must follow all of the above, and have wonky gates.

See, I’d hate it if anyone stood in our yard at Home Farm thinking the worst. That a second-homer lived here. Everything bad that happens is blamed on second-homers, just as we used to blame City bankers for everything we pretended not to like about Notting Hill.

Plus, the action, such as it is, is in Godminster, seven miles away, where there is a Waitrose (Allahu Akbar!), a pannier market with wet fish stand on Thursday and Saturday, a saddlery, two hairdresser’s, three pet shops, a Spar, a tea shop, a takeout place, a derelict and mysterious Men’s Institute, That New Place, Scrimpers the second-hand shop, two delis, six gift shops all selling identical Linum linen tablecloths in restrained Swedish neutrals, splashy Cath Kidston aprons and ironing-board covers in spriggy florals, Dr Hauschka products, Damask nighties, etc. – in other words, a fairly typical, slow-food, West Country town of the type that almost makes me long for takeover by brand retailers like Gap and Starbucks, but not quite.