It's a sentence I never thought I’d utter but, yes, I can relate to the Beckhams. These megawatt drama queens are hardly strangers to ridicule – much of which is deserved – but the snooty scorn heaped on Sir David last week made me bristle with empathy.

He, of course, dared to step outside the British caste system when he transformed many years ago from an East London-bred footballer to a Cotswolds country bumpkin – a crime against class for which no amount of flatcap-wearing can atone.

And what has recently got on the locals’ Diptyque wicks is his lighting proposal for a pond island on their Great Tew estate. In March, one neighbour sniffed that the ‘festooned lighting’ was ‘more akin to Miami or Florida’. ‘If the applicants want to live in suburbia, then why come to an area like Great Tew?’

The local council enlisted ecologist Melanie Dodd to evaluate the pond plan and last week the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden reported her stern advice. The island in question, which was supposed to increase the pond’s ‘value for wildlife’, is doing anything but, according to Ms Dodd.

Partly, she notes, because there is ‘limited cover for nesting birds’ and partly because of the ‘uplighting’ of an oak – but, above all, because the island is ‘being used as a fire pit, with a bridge for access’. OK, illuminating trees is profoundly naff but is Goldenballs ‘cosplaying a farmer’, as one online commentator cried?

Another wrote: ‘He’s a country gent but couldn’t tell the difference between a muntjac and a swallow.’ Well, neither could I when I moved from London to rural Essex five years ago.

When I first saw one of the piggy-looking deer I thought I was hallucinating. And uplighting a tree is exactly the sort of thing I would have done before I learned that it’s annoying for the birds. Indeed, my evolution from a townie – or as they like to call us on England’s south coast, a ‘DFL’ (Down From London) – to a countryside dweller, has been anything but smooth.

I’ve already made an enemy of the local farmer and I still can’t start the lawnmower without my husband’s help.

Each rural faux pas is a cowpat to my Louboutins but I, like David Beckham, am determined to do this countryside thing my way.

I was never a city girl by choice. On the contrary, ever since I can remember I was desperate to escape the concrete jungle and live on a bucolic farm.

Not a farm that kills animals, mind you. More the morally clean, economically impossible sort that only exists in the figment of a child’s imagination; where the work is fun and easy and the livestock die happily of old age.

I’m still chasing that dream. It started, as it often does, with chickens. Ten of them in a cardboard box that appeared as a birthday surprise courtesy of my husband when we lived briefly last year in Italy’s Umbrian hills. I knew enough about chickens to know that they must be housed at night but not enough to know how to herd a flock of them inside on their first evening.

Several hours were spent, as the sun disappeared, pursuing the surprisingly nimble birds around our field with a stick, to the great amusement of our neighbours. Oh how they laughed, too, when I was chased for several hundred yards through the woods behind our house by a furious wild boar before anyone had warned me not to venture into that part of the forest.

In my mind, I looked like Lara Croft, bravely vaulting ditches and ducking branches, but the reality I’m sure was more shrieking banshee.

Back in Essex, where we are living temporarily on a friend’s country estate, life has been somewhat easier.

Aside from the local farmer, who I remain at war with.

I like to let our impeccably-behaved golden retriever Laska off the lead in the quiet livestock-free countryside around the house. It’s the only time she can run freely.

The farmer takes issue with this, on account of her potentially ‘disturbing his pheasants’.

She doesn’t bother them, for the record. I imagine the pheasants are rather more disturbed by his guns, all through hunting season.

This unpleasant character aside, I love where we live and am hugely excited for our next move. We’re finally laying down roots in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York next year; we plan to grow vegetables, get more chickens, host some rescue ponies and launch an Airbnb retreat to make ends meet.

Perhaps in the less class-defined United States people are more forgiving of newcomers’ fumbles. We shall see, but it’s important that us DFLs are not deterred.

Because wouldn’t it be a good thing if the likes of Jeremy Clarkson – a national treasure since founding Diddly Squat Farm – and the Beckhams, for that matter, inspired more people to move out of our traffic-choked cities and into the fresh air, to revitalise rural communities? Shouldn’t more of us be growing our own food? Wouldn’t our children be happier?

Sir David certainly seems to be. Mock him if you will but he looks at home among his bees and home-grown kale – even if the spot-lit birds do not.