As the train hurtles through open countryside, the Kentish oast houses rising like wicker men from the scorched earth, I practise the mid-Atlantic accent I’d ascribed to Eleanor when I first saw the pictures of the house on the app. My initial attempt was a bit hammy, like Madonna’s voice when she married Guy Ritchie, yet the more I talk, the more Eleanor emerges. A teenager dressed in tracksuit top, jeans and trainers smirks at me from the seat opposite. He probably thinks I’m mad but I don’t care. I’m on a roll now as more pieces of Eleanor’s backstory come together. Her upbringing in New York, the only child of Rosa and Anthony, two high-achieving college professors who placed more importance on academic excellence than spiritual well-being. Eleanor growing up feeling pressured and out of place, not helped by the fact that she was dyslexic and therefore found the books her parents thrust under her nose almost impossible to decipher. Words, to Eleanor, were a great mystery, a puzzle she had no chance of solving. Her parents threw money at her ‘condition’ as they called it and sent her to the best schools but she still ended up flunking out of high school with a set of grades that made her mother cry. Lost and in need of some kind of direction, Eleanor found herself answering an online advert in the New York Times to attend something called a Transcendental Meditation class. Though she was unsure of what to expect, what happened next changed the course of her life. Meditation became the key to discovering the happiness and peace she had spent her young life searching for and she became a true devotee. Trips to retreats in India and the Himalayas followed, which culminated in Eleanor becoming a yoga and meditation practitioner and setting up a highly successful YouTube channel while based in LA. With a cult following and six million subscribers, Eleanor soon became a financial as well as spiritual success. Now, she has one goal left. To set up a wellness clinic in her favourite part of the world: the south-east coast of England.

So absorbed am I in Eleanor and her story that, before I know it, the train is trundling into Whitstable station. As I step off the train, I run over what the estate agent had told me on the phone. We have arranged to meet at the property, which is accessed via a private lane called Toad’s Hatch. The name made me think of Tolkien and I smiled, remembering my mother reading The Hobbit to me each night before bed.

Best not to think of that, I tell myself as I type the postcode into Google maps and take a left out of the station car park, best to focus, because for the next few hours all that exists is Eleanor Hawkins and her quest to find the perfect home.