If we cram any more doctors into our spare rooms we can put a sign outside advertising NHS accommodation.

We came by the first one when he answered my ad on a well-known website, booked for a few nights and ended up staying for years. He has a family home elsewhere, but needs somewhere to sleep when he is working late at the nearby hospital.

He is an anaesthetist and no trouble at all. We see him only one or two nights a week, or sometimes less, depending on his shift pattern. He arrives at night, looking like he’s anaesthetised himself, microwaves a ready-meal, then creeps silently to bed. He leaves very early the next morning and we won’t see him again for days or weeks.

‘I don’t know how we got so lucky with that lodger,’ I say to the builder boyfriend. ‘What were the chances of finding someone to pay us rent who we hardly ever see?’ And he agrees: hardly any chance.

But evidently we were wrong. Another doctor contacted me through the same site and is coming to stay for a week while on placement at the local GP surgery. From what she has said, I get the feeling she would like to find somewhere she can stay during the week on a longer-term basis.

I’m going to put her in the main bedroom. With the other doctor in the second bedroom, the builder boyfriend and I can sleep in the loft. It doesn’t have an en suite or a wardrobe even, but it does have a daybed and a sofa so we can manage, I’m sure.

All the doctors can live on the first floor and we can occupy the attic, like mad people. Our somewhat modest terraced house is on the market, so goodness knows what viewers will make of it, but needs must.

Meanwhile, kind readers continue to send me suggestions of farms to buy, some of which they own, some of which are owned by friends, or spotted on the internet. And I’m very grateful, but also embarrassed, because they are all out of my price range.

The reason I originally thought of looking at farms in Ireland is because I cannot afford land anywhere in the UK, and then of course I fell in love with the idea. But I must make clear, before anyone else goes to the trouble of trying to help me, that my problem is not that I cannot find a farm I like, it is that I cannot find a small house with a few acres that I can afford anywhere in Britain.

Rod Liddle once generously referred to me as upper middle class, and that hit me like a ton of bricks. I was totally baffled, because I could not see how I could have portrayed myself so wildly inaccurately for so many years.

I thought I had made no secret of the fact that I mismanage every element of my life from finance to romance. But it’s the horses, you see. Anyone with horses has it made, according to legend. Whereas in reality, as most horse owners will tell you, anyone with horses is desperate and broke.

As for class, having grown up in and around Coventry, I don’t think I ever dared to dream of becoming upper middle class. I do not know how that might have been achieved other than by marriage and then a great deal of artifice.

When I was at London uni, a posh friend invited me back to her family home in Wiltshire for the weekend and I remember her father’s girlfriend getting drunk in the pub and asking me where Coventry was. ‘Is that near Blackpool? Haw haw haw!’ she shrieked. And everyone else laughed too, including me, because I didn’t know what else to do.

‘Where did you say you went to school?’ they kept saying at job interviews. Until eventually a wonderful editor said: ‘I’ve never heard of it, but I’m sure it was very good.’

Years after that I did manage to quite seriously date a guy with a double-barrelled surname, but he annoyed the hell out of me, and so did his stupendously well connected mother. All those white-tie dinners at worshipful companies of this and that. And me speaking my mind over the soup course. It was never going to work.

So here I am, squeezing all the doctors I can into my spare rooms, and wondering how I’m going to tell the builder boyfriend we’ve got another lodger coming without him going off on one of his working-class rants.

If I were more aspirational, I would worry about the neighbours. One doctor in the house can be explained as philanthropy. Two begins to look as though we’re going down the pan.