Lady Bamford’s Cotswold fairy-land Daylesford Farm has sprouted leaves. It is no longer a farm shop, which should be a humble thing. I went to the Chypraze farm shop at Morvah last month, for instance. The proprietor only had honey, he said, and also pork, because he had just killed a pig. Daylesford is a sort of Las Vegas-themed hotel, invoking something half–imagined from something half-real. Caesar’s Palace; the Paris; the Luxor; the Venetian; Le Petit Trianon; Moreton-in-Marsh! It is not uncharming – many of us have a parallel life in which we live in Lady Bamford’s Cotswold fairy-land, on a pile of Lady Bamford’s dragon gold – but it is a travesty, and it should have a floor show.

On a morning in the Easter holidays, it is packed. Nose-to-tail Range Rovers; thankfully mine, which is borrowed, is bigger and newer than yours. This matters here. We pass the holiday cottages – Seed Store, Potting Shed, Egg Store – whose entire access road is gravel – dirt is dirty, you know – and enter a campus. It reminds me of Condé Nast’s University of Stupid (or College of Fashion and Design) in Soho. It has the same careful and vapid aesthetic: here we suck on Valium–washed straw. There is a spa, a dress shop where you can buy a linen dress for £1,000 – though you are also buying an identity, so perhaps it is a bargain, I would have paid more for an identity – a farm shop, a cook shop, a wine shop, a garden shop, a children’s shop, and a school where you can learn one-pot cooking for £210. There are two restaurants – the Trough and Old Spot. We choose the Trough.

We pass the coronation display – the King and Queen, drawn delicately and wonkily on egg cups. In the children’s shop there is a wooden toy– a charcuterie board for assembly – and Paddington bears, because the late Queen took all refugees under her protection if they were fictional and bears. In the garden shop there is a topiary stag for £3,500, and a vintage beehive for £1,500, which is rotting. My husband, who is from a farming family, finds a seed presser: something to pat a seed down with if your finger has been cut off or is sulking, or has gone on holiday by itself. His expression is so agonised a woman asks him if he is OK. He isn’t.

The Trough is bright and wide: a barn that has never seen a live animal or known a smell. The staff are charming in the manner of those with shell shock. The menu comes ‘from the farm’, which I think means the food does. We order a spring green minestrone, a lamb burger with harissa yoghurt and couscous salad, a tomato salad, an orchard salad, a flat-iron chicken with green kale, a lemon sundae, a dark chocolate ‘nemesis’: fat people can’t wear neutrals, so chocolate comes with the promise of vengeance.

The food is close to faultless – the tomato salad is perfect – though the minestrone is not minestrone, the couscous salad is chilly, and the kale is a small forest wearing a chicken. But there is something terrorised here. I think of the virgin forest beyond Salem whose unknowability was the cause of tragedy: if something is remade, if it is owned, can it cease to threaten you? My husband is traumatised, and it isn’t the green soup. His identity, which he has never consciously consulted before, has been torn up by the roots and offered back to him for money, and he cannot afford it. It is owned by people who live 80 miles to the south-east, though they do not want it and they cannot name it.