The two-acre smallholding lived up to its name in being very, very small indeed.

We had to squeeze around the front door one at a time to get into the entrance hall, which was also the front room and the entry to the stairway.

It was a red-brick semi in a row of cottages on a ridge overlooking a valley just outside a quaint Sussex village where we stopped beforehand and convinced ourselves we would be happy with one unfriendly café, a novelty homewares store and a hiking shop that was so pretentious it was advertising ‘directional clothing’.