Cath places the pumpkin centre table, and I can just make out the pleasing words PARMIGIANO-REGGIANO stamped into the wax in a repeat pattern, and the words MAGGIORE 97 and a huge kitemark. She lifts the top half off the cheese, which is, I take a few moments to work out, older than Posy, and a column of steam rises up, making my tummy tighten in delicious expectation of piping-hot food, home-cooked by a hand-picked chef in this home.

‘Soulfood tonight,’ Cath announces, digging her spoon into the creamy depths of the cavity and eviscerating generous dollops on to blue and white porcelain dinner plates. ‘I do hope everyone likes risotto,’ she adds as the plates are passed around. ‘Any allergies? The meal is wheat- and fish- and nut-free, but this,’ she says, looking into the steaming depths, ‘has cream in it, I’m afraid.’ And then she whispers in my direction, as if we are sharing a private joke, ‘And my secret ingredient –Velveeta!’

Everyone cries how lovely, and I hear Ralph politely ask the woman on his right if she has any interesting allergies, as they seem to be in fashion.

‘There’s green salad in the middle of the table, ready to go, I didn’t hold the dressing – I do hope that’s OK.’ And there is a vast green salad of freshly plucked, hand-torn mustard and mizuna leaves and tender baby spinach, plucked herbs fresh from the Cobb kitchen garden polytunnel and greenhouses, lightly dressed with walnut oil and cask-aged red wine vinegar. ‘It’s fah-bu-lous to have these early salads, from the greenhouse, but don’t they make you just long for summer?’ Cath says, to no one in particular, as she dollops away generously on to plates. ‘The cutting garden and the kitchen garden, the parterre, the sequoia… sometimes I don’t think I married Granville. I married the garden. Oh, I should warn you – it’s very heavy on garlic. Can you imagine life without garlic?’ Cath asks the assembled company.

Ralph looks blank but the rest of us cry, ‘Lord no!’ and ‘Perish the thought!’

‘Or cilantro? Or zucchini? Or bell peppers? Or even –’ Cath shudders at such a grisly thought – ‘without tomaytoes?’