In fact, when we did visit these particular neighbours on Friday night, the only man present not wearing a tie was our host.  But, as he told us in a witty speech (raising a good half a dozen laughs against his predecessor’s zero on a similar occasion), he had been up till one a.m. in Brussels the night before at a meeting about the future of the euro and felt that Chequers was somewhere he could relax and put his feet up.

Mind you, Tory country dress in the shires is not what it used to be (assuming your idea of what is de rigueur is based on Blandings Castle or Downton Abbey).  When we were first invited to Sunday lunch by some pretty posh neighbours I thought about it for a while, decided that the full three piece tweed suit might be a bit de trop (my last posting, on French cinema, seems to have affected my style rather)  and replaced the trousers by a pair of brown cords, completing the ensemble (here we go again) by a viyella shirt and fawn silk knitted tie.  The trousers, it turned out, were spot on.  But our host and the other male guests all sported practically identical red sweaters. The penny finally dropped: these poor stockbrokers/lawyers/bankers had to dress up five days a week and were damned if they were going to put on a tie at the weekend.

Anyway, there we all were - the men at least - wearing lounge suits as specified on the invitation, and none of us, as far as I know, even contemplated wrenching off our ties and opening the top couple of shirt buttons to show solidarity with our prime minister.

On our previous visit they’d mainly invited people like us, living either on the estate or in property which had belonged to the estate in the old days.  This time, as Mr Cameron made clear, he had extended this to include people who might be on the periphery of his life at Chequers, but still contributed to the general well-being: local farmers specialising in providing meat for the big house; the newsagent from Wendover,  Wayne Hendy - who delivered the papers even in the depths of the December snow - and his wife Cheryl; Neil and Karen from the Russell Arms at Butlers Cross, who served the Camerons when they turned up at the pub with Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton. (Someone who’s best mates with the man who made Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood can’t be all bad, I thought to myself at the time).

One of the security people who walk past our cottage on a regular basis had told me that the Browns - Gordon at least - had not felt particularly at home at Chequers. But the Camerons appear to be revelling in it. The two elder children mingled with the guests, grabbing the odd canape - while baby Florence even put in an appearance, with her fond papa apparently checking to see if she needed changing.

Perhaps we should have guessed that the atmosphere would have been more relaxed under the new regime. Our invitations, last time, had come from ‘The Prime Minister and Mrs Sarah Brown’; those for Friday’s do were from ‘David and Samantha Cameron’.  In fact, our host and hostess were much more approachable than their predecessors. Gordon and Sarah had worked their way rather stolidly round the gathering; David and Samantha just mingled separately with the crowd, and people were prepared to approach them, rather then wait their turn to be addressed.

I mentioned to Mrs Cameron that we were possibly their nearest neighbours, in the only cottage they pass on the way down Church Walk. ‘Oh, that must be the place we saw when we went sledging on the hill’, she said, adding that they’d gone through our garden by mistake. And we agreed that, if they went sledging again, they should drop in for hot chocolate to warm themselves up.

To the man himself I said that we were probably the only guests who had arrived on foot, escorted by two armed guards.  As on our previous visit we had been given permission to walk up Church Walk, a rare treat since the introduction of stringent security measures.  Up till a couple of years ago we had walked much of this path on a regular basis, usually armed with secateurs or clippers to keep it free from encroaching brambles or ash branches.  This time, with the sun having set behind Beacon Hill, I had taken a stout walking staff, using it to clear fallen twigs and branches so that Jane wouldn’t catch her party frock.

We had also been allowed to walk back in the dark and, at eight, took our leave, informing the security people  at the door so that they would contact the armed police on duty.  One saw the gleam of our tiny Maglite and, using his much more powerful equivalent, saw us to the end of the park proper.

As we walked home, warmed by three or four glasses of an excellent Beaujolais served by absurdly young-looking men and women in RAF uniform, I tried to imagine what it must be like for our host, his guests gone, his children asleep, to come back to the reality of his duties and responsibilities: the thousand and thousands of people due to march through the streets of the capital the following day, protesting against his government’s cuts; the comrades of the temporary waiting staff flying missions ordered by him in the skies over Libya.  Rather him than me.