Whatever Millie said about hoping that all her meals were equally as good as each other, you can see she’s gone all out for dinner this evening with her boss here. We have oysters for canapés, three-cheese soufflé starters, some kind of bird within a bird within a bird like you might imagine Henry VIII eating at a banquet when he wants to impress foreign kings, and then a very light homemade ice cream thing topped with elaborate spun sugar creations.

I sometimes wish I could bring Olivia on these trips. I’m hopeless at schmoozing. I wonder if that’s partly why the business isn’t doing so well at the moment – being able to do small talk seems so much more important now than it used to be. I could really do with some of the Snow Snow chalets in my stable, and also I need Simon to feel like I’m the kind of person he wants to do business with. So there’s a lot at stake, but I know I’m rubbish when it comes to this aspect of the business and it makes me uncomfortable. And much as I love Ria, I can’t always trust her to behave herself like Olivia would. Ria seems to be behaving especially obstreperously this week. She always likes a drink and to be sociable, but she doesn’t usually get so wasted. She’s not her usual self at the moment and I don’t understand why.

On top of that, this evening is not being made any easier by the fact that chalet-owner Cameron is a total arse. He isn’t what I was expecting at all. In all honesty, I thought he’d be a bit like me – public-school-educated, maybe someone who’d inherited the family business and built it up over the years, or made some money in the City or something like that and then decided to invest in ski chalets.

But no, it turns out he built up the company from scratch. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – clearly, it’s something to be admired – but does he need to wang on about it so much? On and on with his self-congratulatory spiel about how hard he’s worked and how well he’s done, along with how much he knows about the industry, about the mountains, and about pretty much everything else as far as I can tell.

I realize I haven’t heard a word Cameron’s said for the last few minutes, partly because Millie is being especially attentive about topping up everyone’s glasses this evening, but mainly because he is such a bore.