She might as well be telling me that he is in fact a good person. The CD has finished and I press play again as if the monks will lead me down a path of peace. Everything feels wrong now. I take a beer from the fridge. I open it quickly and there is a slight hiss. My hand is shaking as I bring the bottle to my lips. I try to think about what I shall make for dinner. I pick out some wilted spinach from the fridge and I figure that perhaps if I soak it in water with some added sugar it may regain its rigidity. I remember my mother used to do this with lettuce but I reckon with spinach it’s probably a long shot. As I’m thinking about the spinach I look into the press under the counter for noodles or rice. All I can see is a giant packet of fusilli that seems to be staring at me. Jenny is curled up at her desk mixing oil paints on her artist palette. Silvers and blues and gold and I wonder if she is going to paint the sea. The sea has so many different forms that it’s quite possible that she will never grow tired of depicting its movement.

The children come in and out of the kitchen on the hunt for snacks. I feel so irritated that I shout about the amount of obese children living in the area and their general lack of self-control. I mimic the women whom I often spot in Tesco, pushing their trolleys full of processed food, their thighs rubbing together. I tell them that that’s not what I want for my children. The first one’s free, I say to them in a tone that’s meant to be menacing but comes across as being highly amusing in their eyes and they start to laugh at me, at their father. I’m talking about Jaffa Cakes, I scream at them, and suddenly I don’t see the humour of it all and in actual fact I’m becoming furious.

The kids head back out on to the green because they know what’s coming. A lecture on the subject of cleaning. I haven’t given them one in a while and anger does this to me. It makes me awfully pernickety about things left lying around the house and my children can recognize these little shifts in my demeanour because the sad fact is that I am too predictable, and that is something that a child will catch on to in no time whatsoever.