When Sir Michael refers to the War, he doesn’t mean the Great War or the Second World War, he means the Civil War. I once made the mistake of asking how many acres he owned. ‘Acres of roof, dear girl, or land?’ he had boomed. ‘Roof or land?’ And then he went on to explain to me that if I ever looked at Hutton, I would notice that from the said roofs sprouted a forest of chimneys – ‘But not all of them draw, y’know’ – and when I asked why, were they blocked? he said no, it was because chimneys were a status symbol in the seventeenth century, because if a house had lots of chimneys, it suggested that the house had lots of fireplaces, and therefore lots of housemaids and child-slaves to tend the fires and go up and down chimneys, as if that were all perfectly obvious. Sir Michael doffs his cap to Gwenda, who gives him a level stare as if to say, ‘There’s no time for civilities now – my entire livelihood, as the proud owner of Honeyborne’s livery yard, is at stake.’

The wooden chairs creak under shifting, tweedy buttocks. A few sit nonchalantly in neck braces, following headlong plunges from horses. The older men have lumpy, crooked fingers, squished together like Walls’ sausages in paper packs from long nights of lambing on windswept hillsides during raw March nights. At least two are wearing, without any irony, deerstalkers, and many of the men in their eighties are fiddling with their hearing aids, as if worried they aren’t going to hear a word above the hubbub.

The women are the houses of Barbour and Puffa or the Edinburgh Woollen Mill, all except Mimi, who is in her Husky, and Cath Cobb and Lulu Bryanston, who are, as usual, looking stunning in their very different ways.

Cath is smooth in caramel cashmere with a little jaunty scarf knotted at her throat, a tweed skirt and a pair of Ferragamo flat boots. Her blonde hair shines like a beacon amongst the hairy sea of sage-green tweed and caps and headscarves. She is sans Granville, as Granville, one supposes, is in New York, or London, or Dubai, or Frankfurt, this week.

Lulu’s rock-chick in extremely tight Seven jeans, a pair of those baby-girl-pink, suede furry boots with pom-poms and a cardigan open to reveal one of her vintage seventies T-shirts. This one is an old Clash one, and dolly-sized. The section of flat, tanned belly (the Bryanstons always manage to go to St Kitts at Christmas despite professing to have no money) seems to deny the existence of the twins and completely rule out the consumption of one too many mince pies over Christmas.