‘Also, if you put all five of them on this floor, that’s three rooms sharing one bathroom.’ Becky deftly stuffed a pillow into its case. ‘You can’t charge two grand for a shared bathroom. A chipped, mouldy bathroom.’

‘Crap!’ I sank onto the bed, which protested with a loud creak. What was I thinking?

I was thinking five and a half thousand pounds!

We were going to have to keep bumbling on through.

‘They could have your room?’ I said, peeping at Daniel through my eyelashes. ‘Then they can use your en suite.’

‘They could not!’

‘It’s either that or Charlie’s, or we send them away with a refund. Which do you prefer?’

Daniel huffed, puffed and stared at the faded carpet for a few seconds while blinking hard, before resting his head against Hope’s fluff of hair. ‘I’ll start clearing my stuff out. Hope and I will sleep in the study. We can use Charlie’s bathroom.’

I very quickly realised that we needed reinforcements. As well as sorting the bedrooms, clearing out and scouring the bathrooms, we needed to empty the dining room, and then find the time to prepare the three-course meal I presumed they were expecting.

I called the one other person I knew in Ferrington, praying she’d not have to work that evening, and would also for some inexplicable reason be up for getting involved in an unfolding disaster.

‘Course I’ll help!’ Alice laughed. ‘It beats another night on the sofa listening to Jase playing Call of Duty. What do you need?’

My new friends were a revelation.

After showing the guests to their rooms, with an extreme apology about the lack of a bathroom for the single room (the drains excuse came in handy after all) and a promise of a slight discount, I used the guise of the glitch in the booking system to subtly discover precisely what Charlie had promised them.

A locally sourced, organic three-course dinner and breakfast I could manage.

The activities were a whole other matter. The Tufted Duck had not prepared me for what the third woman to arrive described as ‘the lifestyle reconfiguration sessions’.

A bit of googling led Daniel to DamsonFarm.com and a basic stock template website that gave scant details beyond the address and some vague marketing waffle. Charlie had cleverly created the impression of exclusivity and up-scale secrecy, rather than a half-baked shambles that hadn’t made it beyond her notebook. So, at least our guests had no preconceived notion about what lifestyle reconfiguration might look like in reality.

Becky had the best idea of the day so far: ‘I think we need to start with alcohol.’

Once Alice arrived, Becky swapped her fleece for a smart pea-coat Daniel dug out of somewhere and took everyone outside for some local mulled-cider tasting. Local, as in Alice had picked it up at the local Co-op. Mulled, as in I’d thrown in varying amounts of cinnamon, cloves and orange juice and then warmed up the three different brands of cider and decanted them into rustic-looking pitchers I’d found in the pantry.