Girls are hosing and mucking out and swabbing docks and grooming while murmuring endearments to the animals.

‘They look much glossier and healthier than the rural poor, don’t they?’ muses Mimi.

‘Of course they do,’ I answer. ‘They have a perfectly balanced diet of oats and hot bran and plenty of exercise, whereas the poor have to get by on a diet of rusk and lard and sugar and offcuts, which are then shaped into disgusting and unnourishing economy meals. Speaking of diet, are you feeling OK? Any strange cravings?’

‘Just even hungrier and tireder than usual,’ Mimi sighs, as we approach the front door to the farmhouse.

Dogs rush out at our approach, barking, and then swarm up to press damp noses in our crotches – a black Labrador, a Jack Russell and a border terrier. We are by now at the porch of Gwenda’s house, a white, two-storey farmhouse with horrid new windows with metal panes, a look that Ceci, who is, like me, very visually aware, calls ‘homesick windows’.

We navigate the usual muddy clutter of wellies, soiled trainers, slippers and chaps in the porch, tangled up with old Barbours and hacking jackets, and I wonder why Gwenda doesn’t invest in a boot rack – the Holding Company does a nice one. So does RH Allison.

‘Ring Bell’ it commands above a sign that details the nature of the rides all ages and all levels can safely undertake, hard hats provided: coastal, in the manège, at hunts, and on the moor. ‘Please Pay BEFORE Lesson.’

I nudge Mimi, to alert her to this edict which seems to suggest that riding lessons are either so dull or so frightening that many will be tempted to ditch and do a runner halfway through. She pulls a pantomime face.

She rings the bell, and I lurk behind her. Gwenda is a woman who relates well to animals but, like many countrywomen who prefer the company of dumb beasts to humans, calls a spade a spade and is thus known with both accuracy and some affection as ‘Scary Gwenda’.

There is an interval, and then I hear footsteps coming down the stairs.

‘What do you want?’ demands Gwenda, scarily, her black hair tied back, a Tattersall checked shirt loosely tucked into filthy jodhpurs. She is in socked feet. At the sight of her, all dogs come whining, and she caresses their heads, and I see them nibble little treats from pockets, out of her brown hand.

And what I also see: a flash of male legs in jeans go past on the landing, a flash that Gwenda sees that I see, but she gives no sign to show us she is aware there is A Man Upstairs in Her House in the Middle of the Day. My eyes flicker back to her face. Her eyes are very blue, and her face has that all-weather skin of the real countrywoman who spends all day every day outside, working in the wind and the sun and the rain with no thought for the dermatological consequences nor supporting the anti-ageing industry whatsoever. She presents herself to the world, without artifice or apology.