You can imagine the looks on everyone’s faces – Mrs Hitchens and so on – while Mimi described the spelt spa in Somerset that she and Mirabel might be going to visit for some glossy magazine. Locals love nothing more than putting incomers – and since I’ve only been here ten years, I am still classed as one, and will be until my descendants have tilled the same soil for at least three centuries – back in their boxes.

But Mimi was oblivious. To her, coming from Lonsdale Gardens in the heart of Notting Hill, it was only to be expected that, in Godminster, darling emporia selling little earthenware dishes of wheat-free plum crumble with nutty all-butter topping and champ would outnumber even charity shops and pet suppliers. To her, coming from the chi-chi environs of Notting Hill, where you need to take out a small mortgage just to buy lunch and a new coat costs the same as an IKEA kitchen, it was to be expected that the local town could supply her with somewhere she could repose in peace, listening to Enya or Clannad while some young woman in a white coat whipped her winter coat from her legs, rather than a neon-lit shop selling Rizlas and Tennent’s lager.

‘Have you noticed, Rose,’ Mimi continued, unaware of the audience in the Stores, ‘that when you have anything done now at a spa, they don’t call it a treatment any more? They’re called rituals, or journeys, as if after you’ve done your eyebrow tweezing, you’ll be somewhere else entirely,‘ she shrieked. ‘Isn’t it utterly ridiculous?’

At this point Celia Bryanston, Ned’s widowed mother, the Dowager of Godminster Hall, who had been studying a jumbo box of Baker’s Complete Meaty Meals intently during all this, grabbed Mimi with a claw-like arm.

‘And who are you?’ Celia B asked Mimi.

Mimi preened, as if she had been recognized by a fan. ‘I’m Mimi Fleming, though I did use to have a column in the Telegraph, under my maiden name, er, which is Mimi Malone,’ Mimi answered.

‘Mimi Malone?’ Celia roared, in a voice much bigger than her wizened frame suggested was possible. ‘Or Mimi Fleming? Do make your mind up, gel!’

Celia went to open the freezer section, removed a Cottage Catering frozen sticky toffee pudding for one and dropped it into her basket. ‘Never heard of you. Either of you.’ Then Celia left the shop, still carrying the basket, and Mrs Hitchens rolled her eyes and shouted, ‘You’ve left without paying again, Mrs Bryanston.’

So, after I hang up, I leave the bedroom, and duck into my dressing-room to change out of my Spanish riding boots, and out of my specially selected vintage tweed pencil skirt edged with suede piping, and a cashmere cardie. (All men absolutely love the new Duchess of Windsor prim, even proto-eco-hippies like Jesse Marlon, it’s a banker of a look, but it wouldn’t do at the stables.)

I walk downstairs now wearing a herringbone-tweed skirt and a blue poplin pin-tucked blouse from Toast, and, as luck would have it, Jesse Marlon is standing in the hall. I saunter down, holding his gaze, without even in fact trying to hide the fact that I am staring at him.