I replace the receiver with a sigh, having promised Fenella that I’d get back to her on the spelt spa gig.

Nothing could make it clearer. My friends, my former colleagues, my old neighbours think I’m flying below the radar. I’ve gone… free-range.

It’s time to face it.

I’m not in Notting Hill now. I am not obeying an unwritten law that all women approaching forty have to weigh eight stone, wrangle with celebrities, interact with the atrophy wives, take their pedigree pets to the new dog spa and deli off Westbourne Park Road, and pretend to each other they don’t suffer from ‘bonus envy’.

I’m not doing the supermodel sweep at the Whole Foods Market on Kensington High Street as they load up on acai berries and seeds from the Food Doctor while bragging about how they, like, never go to the gym, and how they’re, like, so busy running after their kids they don’t need to work out, they’re just naturally this skinny, and they are trying and trying but they can just never put on weight even though we know and they know, it’s nil by mouth for them for literally years at a time.

What a relief, in so many ways.

But.

Because there always is a but.

But, to be brutally honest, though it is a relief, I stand by that, of course – I love the grass, the mud, the fact that I have a view of the rest of Dorset and the sea from my bedroom window (if I stand on tiptoe), and I love drinking in the fresh and clean smell of the countryside, with its wholesome tangy topnote of manure, I love the chill evening airs, the silence, the peace, and I love the fact that I can see all the stars on a clear night, and the Milky Way, and have become best friends with some barn owls, i.e. have allowed myself to be fully penetrated by the beauties of nature – I do still kind of miss it. London. Notting Hill, and all that.

But mainly I miss it because there’s no going back. After all, as everyone knows, and does so love repeating to you, once it’s too late, as if I have made a brave lifestyle choice to dwell in the seventh circle of Hell rather than in an utterly idyllic Dorset model village, ‘Once you’re out of the London property market, Mimi, that’s it, you know! You never get back in.’

All the children are at school, but it’s already 10.30 a.m. so it’ll be dark in a few hours, and if I don’t leave the house soon and walk Calypso I’ll be tempted to go back to bed for a snooze, as that’s so much more inviting a prospect than finally getting to grips with the vegetable patch. My morning dogwalk circuit takes in the Post Office and Stores, the pub, the Stag, and the village green.

OK, the Stag: standard-issue Dorset pub, i.e. it’s wall-to-wall roaring fireplaces, growling local ‘characters’, smell of old pipe-smoke from before smoking ban, nicotine-stained orange ceilings, skull-cracking low beams, Badger ale, famous for… not the beer, not the snug, certainly not the food or the friendliness of its regulars – the chainsmoking woodcutter ‘young’ Colin Watts, the butcher’s son (only young in comparison to most drinkers); the Melplashes; the farmers; the farriers; and so on – but its annual nettle-eating competition, and the house pet.