I can hear Ana moving around upstairs, in the guest room. Creak, thump, creak and crunkle (the loose floorboard by the cupboard). For someone who looks like a size-double-zero Polish sex-worker trying to break into glamour modelling, she’s jolly heavy on her feet, I must say.

Whoah.

I just checked my inbox – and guess what? As well as one from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall at River Cottage, and one from Sarah Raven and one from Johnnie Boden (I feel as if they are not superbrands but close personal friends), there is one in my Bulk folder that I happened to check rather than delete.

It was from an address I didn’t recognize, [email protected] which I thought must be a sneaky one alerting me to the new fitted Polo shirts in this spring’s ‘irresistible’ boiled-sweet colours at the Lacoste store, where I once shopped while doing Covent Garden with Mirabel.

But it is not.

It’s from Virginie Lacoste. Virginie Lacoste. The slippery blonde Frenchwoman who ran circles around us all. Who we thought was having it off with the gingery Bob, the Bostonian banker, but wasn’t. But only because she was fully occupied having it off with Sally, his slender, crop-headed, kickboxing Yankee wife, if not both of them, at the same time.

I’ve always wondered about that.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Hi Mimi, chérie, long time no speaks! How is the country-side?

At this point, one line into her missive, I go into a brief but intense reverie.

Why on God’s earth do those who live in cities think that the country is one identikit location, like Center Pares, or Disneyworld?

I happen to know Ralph has to put up with this sort of thing a lot on the train.

He has to be in London for meetings almost all week. Now, his worst fear is not something bad and nameless happening to me or the children or, even worse, Calypso. It’s unheralded engineering works on the Waterloo-to-Godminster line. Or meeting auld acquaintance en route to the Brambletye (the funky, deluxe boutique hotel outside Godminster, modelled on Babington House).

‘Ralph? Ralph Fleming?’ one half of the eager couple will cry, on the train, moments after he has hidden himself behind some self-published memoir of the chalk streams of Hampshire.

‘Oh, hi,’ Ralph will answer, trying to conceal his panic.

The iron rule on these occasions is: the more faintly Ralph recalls the people hailing him, the more ruthlessly they will lovebomb him. Like cats always cleaving to those who hate cats, Ralph, who hasn’t made a new friend since he was in short trousers, is condemned to receive the near ecstatic attentions of almost perfect strangers who met him once at a PTA meeting in Year Five – a meeting he only attended under the utmost duress, in case he met anyone in the dread category known only as ‘New People’.

‘How’s Mimi? And the kids? How’re they enjoying the move, new schools, and all that? Bit of a change, eh, Dorset? You were in Notting Hill, weren’t you? Downshift, did you?’