‘Mimi?’ comes a tweeting voice I know well. ‘It’s Fenella!’ she announces with excitement, as if she has produced her own grandchild.

‘Hiiiii!’ I cry.

Fenella Prigeon is the beauty editor of Results∗ magazine. We used to work together on the Telegraph, a million years ago. Last glimpsed by me at a tea party in Burlington Arcade for Tatler types and their posh pets (I was returning a pair of Vilebrequin swimming trunks that I’d bought for Ralph as a lovely present, which he had spurned without a second glance, reminding me that his old pair, minus elastic, were absolutely fine, and would be for many years, thank you very much).

‘So, how are you?’ I cry, as if I really really want to know, automatically slipping back into insincere mode. I have never mastered the trick of simply being the same with everyone. With Fenella, therefore, I go all glossy and gushy.

‘Oh,’ comes a faint sigh, an exhalation, as if I simply can’t imagine the suffering. ‘I don’t honestly think I’ve ever been so exhausted. It’s been completely utterly frantic. Really manic.’

I log on, input my password.

‘Why?’ I ask, knowing what’s to come. Ralph has a theory that, if you listen to Fenella talk, you’d think that in harsh contrast to testing cellulite gels and naso-labial creams for a monthly magazine, slogging it out in the trenches of the Somme was a teddy bears’ picnic.

‘It’s the, the spa guide,’ says Fenella, with a break in her voice. ‘I’ve had to write up no fewer than fifty – that’s five zero – spas over the past six months, including some in the Far East and the Caribbean. I’m totally wiped out, before I’ve even begun on the living nightmare that is the annual teenage skincare issue.’

‘You poor thing,’ I say automatically.

‘That’s why I’m calling you, actually…’ Fenella goes on, a wheedling note entering her voice.

‘There’s this new spa, I thought you could go, take Mirabel. You only have to write 150 words, and you’d get, I’d say, at least two free treatments.’ Fenella throws this morsel in knowing full well that there’s nothing, nothing, I like more than a luxury junket.

As she speaks, I am already picturing my eldest daughter and me lounging around in fluffy white robes, having massages to tinkling New Age music – somewhere hot, I’m thinking, Bali, or the Maldives – while demure maidens minister silently and with total concentration to our toenails.

‘Gosh, Fenella,’ I say, playing it cool, wanting her to think I’m still a player, ‘I have a black diary at the moment, things are sooo busy, I don’t know if I could squeeze a minibreak abroad in right now… where is it?’

‘It’s in Somerset,’ she says, in the reverential tones of one who has dutifully swallowed all the guff about expensive English holidays in the rain being so much nicer than cheap hot hols abroad. ‘On an organic farm, where they make their own pizza and muesli and bread, with – hold on, let me just grab the bumf – spelt. Spelt. Apparently it’s some ancient type of wheat – hold on, it’s a grain from the grass family with a fragile gluten content, whatever that means. Anyway, all the therapies in the spa, and treatments, well, they’re spelt-based too, and I just thought, well, you’ve lost your column on the mag, you‘re local, aren’t you? – you’re in Dorset – there’s no way I can fit it in with all my other commitments to do with the eco hair products special issue we’re planning for the spring, just no conceivable way! Not from London. It takes longer to get to Somerset than it does to Ibiza. I can’t pay you, but you could drive over, check it out, file 150 words… I thought it’d be a treat.’