Home ground, and about half the book. The Old Brush Works is at Wallbridge, so most Frome clients are inside a ten-minute drive of the linen and the spare vacuum. The town gives us the widest range of houses we clean: Georgian townhouses off Catherine Hill with original limestone and staircases that want doing by hand, 1930s semis out towards Berkley, and a growing number of new-builds on the Selwood side where the whole job is dust and glass for the first year. Weekly and fortnightly rounds run Monday to Friday, and Frome is the only place we can usually fill a cancellation the same week.

The village round, and the one that fills first. These are older houses with softer materials — flagstones, waxed boards, painted plaster, Aga kitchens — which is precisely the work Nell was trained for, and word travels quickly in a village. Rode and Norton St Philip share a Wednesday, Beckington and Nunney a Tuesday, Mells a Thursday. Because the villages are grouped by day rather than by postcode, a Wednesday opening in Rode genuinely is the next one available; we will not put a Beckington house on a Wednesday just to say yes.

The outer edge, twenty to thirty minutes out, taken in whole days so nobody spends the morning in a van. Trowbridge has Monday and Thursday and is our second-biggest round after Frome. Westbury sits on Monday, Radstock on Thursday, Bruton and Warminster share a Friday. Wells is currently full with a waiting list of about six weeks, which we would rather tell you here than after you have filled in a form. Holiday lets across all six are handled on changeover days rather than the regular round, so a Saturday turnaround does not cost somebody their weekly clean.

Ring anyway — 01373 802 415. The round changes twice a year, and occasionally one client in a new village is enough to justify a stop if a neighbour joins. What we will not do is take the work and then serve it badly by rushing the house before yours. If we cannot reach you properly we will say so, and where we can we will name someone local we would use ourselves.

Each cleaner works one geography a day rather than criss-crossing the county, which is why the day matters more than the postcode when you ask us for a slot. It also means a cancellation in Rode can usually only be filled by another Rode house — so when the checker says Wednesday, Wednesday is genuinely what is on offer. Twice a year, in January and July, we redraw the whole round: some people move house, some move to fortnightly, and the redraw is when a village that has been on the waiting list finally gets a day of its own. If you are waiting, that is when your letter comes.