When London friends ring – which is admittedly fairly infrequently – they drawl, ‘So… where exactly are you in Dorset?’ in bored voices, as if they know this terrain like the back of their hand. I don’t bother to explain. I just say, we’re about forty years west of London, which is about right.

Nor do I have anyone to VENT to. There’s no book group, there’s no yoga group, there’s only the pudding club, the pub and the Women’s Institute, which I haven’t joined.

It was funny, Clare’s next email in reply to my LibDem manifesto one asked me to describe what it’s ‘really like’ in Honeyborne, as if I’d been glossing over reality. This is a bit like when friends ask, ‘But how are you REALLY?’ as if they will feel personally, deeply let down unless you can produce, exclusively for them, some report of a recent emotional disaster.

Well. Whinge over. Better now. The truth is, wild horses wouldn’t drag me back to London, and Ralph knows it.

Rose

Next day, Mimi and I are walking Calypso, after the school run, before the magic hour when Jesse Marlon appears at the Dairy. There’s a small crowd outside the Stores. We draw near, as if being pulled by magnetic force. It looks as if something might –for once – be actually happening.

‘Two and a half hours, in the cells,’ Biddy Pike is saying, flushed with all the attention. She does not glance at me as I approach, but I am not deterred.

Mimi has Calypso on a lead. Calypso is greeted with obvious pleasure by all the other dogs, but hardly anyone else even nods when we join the group. There is a sombre mood. Mimi and I exchange a glance. Biddy Pike’s reputation, like mine, precedes her in this village, only in a different way.

‘Have you noticed – the rare moments that she’s not on a horse, that is – that she walks leaning forward, as if into the teeth of a gale?’ asked Mimi, after she had inspected her the first couple of times. ‘I am beginning to think she doesn’t have feet. I think she might have hooves.’

When Ceci fell off her pony on her first day out, with Gwenda and Biddy, it was Biddy who rang me to say that she would be fine and back in the saddle in no time as it was just a scratch’. When I rushed to Godminster General, heart thudding, I found Ceci – my baby - sitting in Casualty with a bone sticking out of her wrist, with Biddy, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, who just gave me a stare as if to say, ‘So?’ And I couldn’t scream and run at her.

Anyway, be that as it may, I now tug at the sleeve of Colin Watts, the leggy, mostly silent mainstay of the Honeyborne cricket team, who is eating a Crunchie in that male, nonchalant way that men do, as if they eat chocolate bars all the time, whereas women do these things as if they are a private, secret indulgence, like reading the Daily Mail, or masturbating. Colin Watts is one of those people one sees everywhere. He always wears jeans and a heavy leather jacket and workboots, and he usually has a cigarette in his hand. I’ve even seen him around with the now-adult Cobb sons, Florian and Marco and Hector (Cath must have had a Venice theme going on in her child-bearing years).