I have never been so miserable in my whole life, even including the day Smudgie was run over, not quite killed and left to endure a slow, agonising death because we all loved her too much to stamp on her head.

And it was all my wife’s fault. Entirely. She had forgotten rule one of the How to Book a Cottage bible: read between the lines. Because cottage-floggers are almost as naughty as estate agents when it comes to describing the accommodation.

If the nice cottage website describes a place as “well connected to the nearby town of X”, it means it’s on a motorway hard shoulder. If it says, “the owner is very welcoming”, it means she will talk the hind leg off your donkey. And if, as in our case, it says, “we can offer you a truly rural experience, and with the land being worked predominantly by shire horses, you may be forgiven for thinking that you have gone back 60 years in time”, it means you will go back 60 years in time. Literally.

Now, I know we’re all into nostalgia at the moment. Current climate and all that. But 60 years ago was 1949. They still had rationing. People were dressed entirely in clothes made from rat hair. The only things you could have on toast were lard and sprout peelings. There was no Strictly Come Dancing, no Wii and no M&S food shops in service stations. Why would anyone want to have a holiday in 1949?

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The trouble is, Wife is a romantic. She loves shire horses, particularly the smell of them. She loves farms. She goes on and on and on about how she always wanted to marry a farmer but got me instead. Worse, she loves Devon. I’m all right with the coastal bits. Very pretty. Nice beaches. Good surf.

But mid-Devon, that stretch trapped between Dartmoor and Exmoor, is like troglodyte land. All bleak hills and bleaker valleys, terrifying teashops and speeding tractors. This is where the 1949 farm is. And when she finds out the farmer is also a wood-sculptor, there’s no stopping her. Even though I do actual begging. On my knees. With tears and everything.

The next thing that happened was that the whole family got flu. The thing after that was that it rained unremittingly for 24 hours in Devon just before we were about to set off. The county was awash with flood alerts, so we agreed to postpone the holiday I already knew would be rubbish. Only by a day, though.

Unfortunately.

As our satnav chirruped increasingly specific instructions to home in on our farm (“which has so much to offer”), we found ourselves on a single track. For miles. It was muddy and strewn with branches, and someone - I think it was Wife - said something like, “Christ, I hope this isn’t it,” as we approached a collection of dilapidated farm buildings past a sign with “Mr Croom” daubed in gruesome green paint. Mr Croom would undoubtedly be a grumpy Devonshirish farmer who wouldn’t take kindly to nonagricultural types like us coming here with our fancy satnav in our fancy... Skoda.

Of course it was it. I knew immediately, because I could hear a chainsaw. It was our farmer - a thoroughly affable young chap, once you’d stopped him chainsawing. (And not Mr Croom - we would never find out who he was.) Our farmer’s yard, which I’d had to negotiate to reach him, was muddy, deeply muddy, the sort that muddy pigs love but sniffy and sniffing city folk don’t. Very 1940s. Around its edges, machinery lay rusting and towards one corner you could see the bottoms of three shire horses.

While the farmer showed Wife around the inside of our accommodation, I unloaded the six carloads of clothes, food, toys, books and kitchen sinks we’d unnecessarily managed to squeeze into the one car. He then went back to his chainsawing, while Wife said, “I want to go home,” and I said something like, “This was your idea. We’ve paid £400. We’re staying.”

If you could ignore the sound of the chainsaw and the swamp outside the front door, our farmhouse was perfectly nice, in a fairly cheaply furnished, depressingly gloomy, I-can’t-believe-we-left-our-nice-house-to-come-and-live-here-for-a-week kind of way. But it’s the little things that make the difference.

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