I have to wear something tonight, but what? I don’t want to look as if I’ve tried too hard. I don’t want to look as if I haven’t tried at all. At least, at Court Place, I won’t be cold. I stare at my clothes for ages. Daywear is no problem, obviously.

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?’