Both Lulu and Cath are blonde. But Cath is blonde in a creamy way that speaks of generations of inherited wealth on both coasts of the US, Lulu is blonde in an elegant, nervy, desert-bred way, like a Saluki. Lulu can get away with almost anything, as she proved when she teamed pink Nanook of the North boots dripping with pointless pom-poms with nothing but a Melissa Odabash chambray bikini and a Texan cowboy hat (to the general annoyance of all who carried the X chromosome) when après-skiing last April in Courchevel. Lulu keeps hens, called things like Biker Chick, Rock Chick and Dixie Chick, to prove she is much younger and hipper and, above all, much thinner than most of the other Dorset wives.

I’m just comforting myself with the thought that Lulu’ll find her forties and fifties even harder than me, because her face has been her fortune, when Ned holds up a hand to silence Henry Pike.

Henry, though, has started in on one of his favourite topics, which is the impossibility of sex after marriage. This, along with horseflesh and hunting, is a topic that he likes to cover from every angle, especially if everyone in the room has already heard the famous Henry Pike anecdote, which is as follows:

‘I was in this bar, in Tokyo, and I saw this girl. The eyes met across a crowded room,’ the Master’s story goes, ‘and I honestly felt the knees go weak. I hadn’t had a woman in months. So I pushed through the crowd. Bought her a drink, which was damnably expensive. But my Lord, she was a fine-lookin’ piece, long brown hair, bosoms, the whole lot. And then she said, “You want come back my prace?” And I thought I did, rather. So we left the club, and then we went on foot for hours through suburban bloody Tokyo, till we came to this hovel. And then, well, we got down to it. And, erm, well, it was really rather spectacular, as these things go. I’d never had a rogering like it. It was completely thunderous.’

Henry will always pause mistily at this point, relishing every detail, as if he were back in the hovel with the Japanese girl, which only goes to heighten expectation.

‘So then she said, getting up, “You want a beer?” And a warning bell started, you know, tinkling distantly, and I thought, “Beer? Beer?”

At this point all the audience will be also crying out, ‘Beer? Beer?’, and wiping the tears of merriment from their eyes.