1. there’s my possible condition but, 2. I can’t help thinking of all the mothers sitting in care homes dribbling for the rest of their lives after their horses pitched them headfirst on to concrete aged just forty.

I have to weigh those factors against the brute reality that not riding is a crushing disability in itself, and not having children who ride in Dorset is almost worse than not being able to drive in LA, i.e. it’s total social exclusion.

Last year, I swanked to Marguerite back in Lonsdale Gardens –I suppose I wanted it to get back to everyone on the communal garden – that we were in clover and it was all peachy and that all the children were hunting all the time with the Bodens (of lamby, funnel-necked-fleeces fame) and it was all a tremendous, rip-roaring success.

Well, I lied!

The truth is, Trumpet, Posy’s pony (well, to be strictly honest, he was handed down to us by the Bodens but we consider him ours now) just wanders about the paddock and the orchard eating windfalls and getting fat, just like me really. Then, last Sunday I met this woman after church – Ralph says church is non-negotiable – when I was in the graveyard having a lovely time deciding where I wanted to be buried (graveyard plots in select churchyards are a bit like pushy London private schools, you have to secure your place ages before you actually need it). She looked me up and down, the way country people do when they meet you for the first time, as if you are a hill-bred suckled calf at a livestock sale.

‘If you move to Dorset,’ she said, moving out of earshot of the vicar, the Revd Wyldbore-Smith, who was merrily gurning at parishioners and pumping their hands, ‘it’s shag, drink or ride,’ at which my heart naturally sank, and then she whinnied, ‘or in my case, all three! Hee hee!’

I have to admit, on mornings like this, in the rain, I’m finding this whole transition to becoming fully pastoralized… a lot harder than I thought. And lonely. So another thing I miss, lots and lots is… my old social life and, as for spontaneity, it’s gone out of the window.

Leaving the house for anything is like a Territorial Army expedition, and I always have those little news stories at the back of my mind about climbers on Snowdonia, or wherever, who, the papers sniff, never had the ‘appropriate equipment’ and who set out for the summit ‘in trainers’ in ‘worsening weather conditions’ and without sat nav, compasses or supplies, as if leaving home without Kendal mint cake were an indictable offence and it was all their fault, as if they were determined to waste taxpayers’ money and bother the air ambulance service rather than have a healthful hike in the open air. So any venturing forth requires a minimum of three pairs of shoes and five kagoules and, if you’re going to someone else’s house, it’s quite normal to come in wellies and then change into slippers, even for a dinner party – and the very few we’ve been to of those are a sort of three-day event.