Next month marks a year since I downsized from a six-bedroom home to my honey-stoned cottage in one of the Cotswolds’ prettiest villages.

I’ve spent the summer opening my front door to find American tourists taking photographs of my house and marvelling at our English country gardens.

On hot summer days, the hedgerows were idyllic, overflowing with wafting daisies and endless clouds of cow parsley. Roses tumbled over the dry-stone walls.

So, am I happy in my new home? I feel so guilty that I can hardly admit, even to myself, that the answer is no.

I am in the right location. And wouldn’t Kirstie Allsopp say that’s what it’s all about: ‘location, location, location’?

Well, only to a point, in my case. And not when you’ve made the rather more serious mistake of buying the wrong house.

The fact I have struggled to admit to myself is I’ve downsized too far, and too soon.

There were so many factors to consider when I first decided to downsize. Inheritance planning, for starters. The obvious practical issues: How would I manage a large garden in later life? Why did I need six bedrooms?

My girls were grown up and grandchildren were arriving. Surely it was time for them to host me for lunches, Christmas holidays and high days?

That hasn’t happened. It is still my kitchen everyone gathers in on Sundays, and there are no prizes for guessing where Christmas lunch is this year. Don’t get me wrong, everyone mucks in and, secretly, I love it.

On so many other levels, as I headed through my 60s, downsizing did make perfect sense, so I bit the bullet. Finding the right house wasn’t easy – especially in a climate in which people are too nervous to sell. So my first piece of advice to anyone considering doing what I have done is this: Don’t feel pressured into buying a property you know isn’t right for you.

If you have to persuade yourself that it is right, if you have to work out how you can ‘make it fit’, perhaps your instinct is trying to tell you something.

I took all the advice I was given. I decluttered and brought very little with me that wasn’t either useful or beautiful – or so I thought. Yet I still found myself surrounded by boxes I couldn’t unpack because there was nowhere to put their contents, and furniture that was too big.

Eventually, I had to call in the auctioneers – which was unexpectedly painful. For example, why did I feel such an attachment to my petrol lawn mower when the new house had no lawn?

Perhaps it was because, at my old house, I got such an enormous sense of satisfaction from mowing the grass and, exhausted, looking back at those perfect green stripes, even if they lasted barely 24 hours. Maximum effort for minimum return.

Which brings me to my second piece of advice: Be brutal, take almost nothing with you. And I mean almost nothing.

Start from scratch, however painful that feels. Otherwise, you merely prolong the agony. You will either end up offloading it all anyway, as I did, or living with furniture you know belongs to a different house and a bygone period of your life. It will always look too big and never quite right.

Once I had sold the furniture, I set about trying to make the house fit my needs.

So, I extended and refitted the kitchen, remodelled and refitted the rest of the house. My good friend, the socialite and globally renowned interior designer, Nicky Haslam, took on the sitting room and transformed it into something beautiful. I landscaped the courtyard garden and ordered new furniture to replace everything I had just sold for peanuts.

The expense was more than twice what I had budgeted. The cost of materials was eye-watering. The result is that I have probably spent more on the house than it is worth – a rookie mistake for someone who has owned and developed properties for almost 50 years.

I have also discovered the importance of storage. In a small house, there is no such thing as too much of it. Not an inch of space can be wasted. My best buy so far has been a £20 full-length shoe storage rack from Amazon. It’s a game changer.

My final piece of advice is: If you are thinking of downsizing for the same reasons I did, don’t do it too soon, while you are still young enough to enjoy the space.

Every year I host a Christmas party. This year, I find myself looking at the size of the rooms and trying to recall the Guinness World Record for the number of people squeezed into a phone box.

I haven’t told my family yet, but next spring I’m having the house valued and have re-installed the Rightmove app on my phone.

Yes, it looks as though I may be putting myself through the whole thing again. And this time, I’ll be looking for a house with a lawn.

Because I never quite managed to get rid of that petrol mower.

I think I always knew, much as I tried to persuade myself, I wasn’t quite done with moving yet.

Richard, a well-mannered Traitor

I’m glued to The Celebrity Traitors and love, love, love the eccentric actor Richard E. Grant, who blurted out in spectacular fashion that he was a Traitor in the first episode. In doing so he has consigned himself to the annals of television history.

I will never believe it was anything other than an act of sheer guile and brilliance. However, I suspect he may be leaving hot on the heels of Amol Rajan – who is clearly peevish about the fact he was the first to leave, complaining that ‘it was all in the edit’.

If Richard is voted out, I’m sure that he’ll show how to be a good loser – self-deprecating, well-mannered and graceful.

A TV reality offer too far

I managed to wriggle out of taking part in a new reality TV show by Channel 4. It’s a celebrity version of Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing, which involved total strangers being handcuffed together for as long as they could manage. The pair who survived the longest won a £100,000 prize.

I’d have been partnered with another celebrity, and it would mean sleeping while handcuffed, taking showers together (I assume with a bag over his or her head). Worst of all, I’d have no idea who my partner was until the host Jonathan Ross paired us on the first day of filming.

The thing that ultimately put me off was imagining the worst possible celebrities I could be cuffed to – I won’t share my list!

I know it’s going to make fantastic TV. I can’t wait to watch it from my sofa with a bag of popcorn – and a large side order of relief.

We are on to you, Mr Rich Tealeaf 

After many years of hard work, I found myself in the privileged position of being able to send my three children to public school. My eldest daughter, who was very fond of wearing designer clothes, used to return home from school with half of her wardrobe missing. When I asked where they’d gone, she told me: ‘Rich people steal, Mum.’

I was reminded of her words last week when I visited a local farm shop. Unstaffed, it relies on an honesty box and a card machine to pay for goods.

As I entered, a man around 40 was already inside with his arms full of shopping. I had noticed his smart green Land Rover Defender in the car park, and he was dressed like an extra from The Gentlemen. For some reason, he seemed impatient for me to leave. When it became clear I wasn’t going anywhere, he slipped a £10 note into the till – far short of the value of goods he was carrying.

I am sure if I hadn’t been there, he’d have left without paying anything. Obviously not all rich people steal but there are those who feel the rules don’t apply to them.

I called the owner of the farm shop, who has CCTV in the car park and knew exactly who I was talking about. Maybe next time Mr Tealeaf will think twice.

On Sunday, two of my three offspring were perched at the kitchen table, laptops open, trying to buy tickets for Glastonbury. I crept out. All the tickets sold out in 42 minutes. Later the whoops and shouts assured me it was safe to go back and make my morning coffee.

Gen Z are ‘sleepmaxxing’ – optimising their sleep through strict routines – to improve their health and live longer, according to a survey by Herbalife. I hate to tell them, but every generation has ‘maxxed’ out on sleeping in their teen years. I managed 14 hours straight on one occasion!