Annoyingly, I muse on my way to the stables, I didn’t even know there was a media room at Court Place. Cath is always doing things, changing things round, converting barns and installing libraries, and it’s also so bloody big that if you want to ask someone something, it’s quicker to call them on their mobile. In Cath’s case, as her family and friends are often over from Marin County, this often means placing an international call from the Court Place kitchen to a Californian mobile in order to tell someone in the orangery that it’s lunchtime. Also, the very fact that they have a media room is, though I hate to say it, rather vulgar. We’re in West Dorset. Not the West Coast.

So my hackles rather rise, even though I know that in fact Granville would only penetrate the media room in the old granary to watch Chariots of Fire, which he says is so good that he prefers to watch it over and over again, tears welling in time to the stirring thumps of the Vangelis soundtrack, rather than to watch a wintry, Turkish film with subtitles about a couple’s disintegrating marriage that’s not even set in Istanbul.

And it also annoys me how Cath had nabbed Jesse Marlon.

No doubt her plan is to get him together with that daughter of hers, who’s just left Exeter university. Serena. Blonde, skinny, glossy, now works in magazine PR.

I bet they watched Prime together in the media room on huge suede bean bags that Cath designs herself or on sofas covered with enormous furry throws, with that reindeer-skin floor covering from the Rug Company, but I do not trust myself, not now I have feelings for Jesse Marlon, to ask.

At the yard, girls in jodhpurs the colour and patina of field mushrooms, black boots and navy fleeces circle about with saddles and hats. Mimi and I stand uncertainly as stablegirls and grooms lead bulgy ponies and nostrilly horses in and out of a ring, saddles and sweaty numnahs tucked under capable arms. No one takes any notice of us. ‘Does Gwenda know you’re coming?’ I ask, suddenly nervous myself.

‘No,’ says Mimi. ‘Does that matter? Does one need to make an appointment, months in advance, through her PA?’

I can see her point. The Honeyborne Stables and Livery Yard doesn’t look very organized. It consists of a farmhouse, where Gwenda lives (no garden – gardening is uninteresting to most people who farm and ride), a large barn, empty save for the obligatory carcasses of several dead cars resting on bricks, and the stables. Empty oil cans litter the dirt floor, along with sacks, cans and bottles, old newspapers, car entrails, and the grot and grime of a hundred years.

‘Why do people in the country never throw anything away?’ I say to Mimi, as we both take in the usual barnyard scene, and I feel like averting my eyes. ‘Have they no visual sense whatsoever?’

Over by the stables, though, it is a different story, and I mentally withdraw my comment. Here it is quiet professionalism.