A tiny man in a traditional woven topi hat comes out to greet us. After a ‘namaste’ or two, he shakes Dean warmly by the hand. ‘This is my boss, Mr Thakari,’ Dean says.

The man, who is half Dean’s size, laughs roundly at the idea. ‘We are happy to have Mr Macaulay here,’ he tells me. ‘But he needs to be married with a wife and children of his own.’ He gives me the once-over. ‘It is not good for a man to be alone. I tell him this many times.’

This man and my mother would get on like a house on fire.

‘You must come here, sister, to our village,’ he continues, ‘and make him a happy man. Can you not see how sad he is without a woman?’ Mr Thakari breaks into uproarious laughter again. ‘I will take you to the astrologer. Come, come. He will tell if it is auspicious for you to have a union.’

Dean flushes. ‘I think it’s time I showed you around,’ he says. ‘We’re going to see the kitchen garden, Mr Thakari.’

‘Namaste!’

Dean hurries me to the back of the conservation building. ‘Sorry about that,’ he says.

‘It’s okay. I get the same thing from my mother all the time.’ I’m so looking forward to her trying to pair me off with all her bridge partners’ loser sons when I get home.

‘As a Westerner, you never quite stop being an oddity here,’ Dean adds. ‘Especially an unmarried Westerner.’

We walk into a neatly tended field filled with a variety of crops. ‘We’re experimenting with different types of fruit and vegetables to encourage the villagers to grow a wider range of produce,’ Dean tells me with an enthusiasm born of keen commitment. ‘And we’re also establishing projects to bring clean water supplies to the area.’

It serves to make my work on My Baby look very sickly indeed. Does anyone really care how a minor celebrity felt during her birth experience? The awful thing is that at one time, not too many weeks ago, I would have said they did.

I’ve begun to realise that our way of life has a certain unreal quality to it—if you choose, you can sit on the sofa with a nice cup of tea and a few choccy biscuits watching a war, a famine, catastrophic floods and earthquakes, devastation on an amazing scale, unfold live on the BBC. All these images are brought to us in the comfort of our own homes. How weird is that?