For someone as dramatically indecisive as me about clothes, layering has been a godsend, especially as it’s warmer outside than in and I have put on a whole stone since moving west. I am for the moment putting all the blame for my weight gain (not that anyone’s yet noticed) on scones, to which I have become addicted. They’re totally worth the wheat, even when I make them. I also blame everyone else. Everything one is given to eat, in people’s houses or in pubs, is either encased in suet and BSE-enriched pastry or covered with a topping of buttery mashed potato, peaked into waves, and often both. In fact, so far as the shires are concerned, cuisine minceur is probably just bad French for ‘100 Ways with Mince’.

So, until the blissful time I can download my winter clothes straight from NASA, I just put everything I find on the floor in my room on top of each other, often in the dark, and never take them off, and while I can’t boast that wearing thermals in bed does wonders for the sex life, it sort of works for me, if not Ralph, who is starting to wonder out loud if he’s ever going to see me nude ever again…

But evening wear in the country? Tricky. One doesn’t want to be one of those women from the shires who dresses herself to the nines in designer separates, heels and full stage make-up for those rare gala nights out; it just looks so scary and desperate.

I become aware of a stormy, disapproving presence hovering in the doorway. It is Mirabel, home from school, a coltish shape wearing opaque black tights, Converse trainers she has customized with Tippex, a denim miniskirt, and a crop top that skims her navel. Just looking at her dewy, peachy freshness, at a time when I’m rubbing foundation on to the black shadows under my eyes with a piece of kitchen towel, makes me feel my age.

‘Mum!’ she says in a shocked voice. ‘You’re not. Seriously. Going out like THAT, are you?’

Mirabel and I have reached a new ‘phase’ in our relationship. Basically, she ignores me unless I do something so deliberately annoying – such as dancing/singing along to radio/borrowing her special DuWop Lip Venom and managing to ‘mank it up’, i.e. get one single speck of dirt on to the lid. Then she will threaten to get a gun and shoot me. At least, that’s what she said when I started grooving on down to Lily Allen in front of Aspen from the stable cottages and Spike, Sophy’s son, who was also here, from the eco-village. ‘Nooo!’ she started wailing. ‘Noooooo!’ and mimed blasting my head off.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ I say. I think my grooming is – in comparison with recent sorties, anyway, of a reasonably high standard, if not dressage at International Horse Show Olympialevel.

‘What I mean is,’ says Mirabel in a softer voice, ‘I’m kidding. Actually, you look sick.’ She removes her copy of a book called Bratfest at Tiffany’s, the sequel to Sealed with a Diss, from the floor, and makes as if to leave.