Becky grinned. ‘One more round and then we’ll calm them down with sleeping lions.’

He shook his head as if mystified, grabbed the final corner of tart and whisked back out.

15

I managed a full two hours of sleep. Becky finished off the ‘entertainment’ with hot chocolate and buttery crumpets and I finished clearing up. The guests retired just before midnight, with the promise of a packed day of activities to come. I then sped ten miles to the nearest twenty-four-hour supermarket and loaded up a trolley with food and drink. I also chucked in some patterned notebooks with matching pens and about twelve different magazines. Arriving back at the farm around two, I spent an hour planning the next day, followed by another hour having an imaginary conversation with Charlie about how on earth I’d ended up running her lifestyle reconfiguration retreat. If anyone needed a lifestyle reconfiguration, surely that was me?

When the guests bumbled downstairs for breakfast at eight, I had kicked into action mode. The breakfast table was laid, a fire crackled in the grate and the kitchen was a bastion of organised efficiency. I was wearing a sleek charcoal dress that was the essence of respectable hotelier. After her disturbed night in the study, Hope was crotchety and disgruntled, but Daniel had taken her out for a walk before a work call at ten.

Chock-full of creamy cinnamon oat-milk porridge, smoky homemade beans on rye toast and a dozen eggs (the green-bean eater enjoyed a bowl of berries while the ‘vegan’ snarfed up the spare portion of eggs), the guests gathered in the living room for the first activity.

I took another emergency trip to Charlie’s bathroom (the only one available to me at that point) to stare hard at myself in the mirror, channel something of my previous badass persona from the page to my actual personality, and grit my teeth until I was at almost no risk of bursting into tears, and then headed downstairs.

‘Right, who’s up for some vision crafting?’

‘Vision what-ing?’ Simon asked, glancing up from his phone.

‘Ooh, yes,’ green-bean-and-berries said. ‘Is there a prize for the best one? Do we get a grade?’ Her eyes went round with excitement. ‘Or a certificate?’

‘Absolutely not,’ I replied, hastily continuing after her face plummeted. ‘As you’ve already heard, Damson Farm is about you being you. It’s your vision, your craft. How can any of us judge or critique, or grade someone at being their best selves?’ I waved my hands around, trying to remember how Becky managed it the evening before. ‘Here, we don’t even judge ourselves!’

‘So, to repeat, what exactly are we going to be doing?’ Simon asked, not even bothering to look up this time.

‘We are going to be considering four questions that are vital in the quest to reconfigure our lifestyles to become our best selves. Who we were. Who we wanted to be. Who we ended up being, and who we want to become. Some of you here have spent the past ten years running yourselves into the ground chasing what you’re supposed to want. Meanwhile, your dreams are asking, “What happened to opening that café in the Alps? Where are the dogs we were going to rescue? You promised me we were going to learn the cello, try an open-mic poetry night, sit in the garden with a book and do absolutely nothing all day.”’