Living on the breadline, however, continued to be the name of the game for the Trenchard family. One of the ways in which Katie embraced this culture was by starting to make clothes for her children, using off-cut fabrics that she bought from the local drapery store in Fort William. Her design principle was based on what her children seemed to be comfortable wearing. Baggy trousers in brightly coloured brushed cotton with elasticated waists, and big pockets in which useful things like toy tractors and crumbling biscuits could be stored. The design for her skirts followed a similar vein. Next came sweaters with wide, easily rolled up sleeves, and made out of a polar fleece material that Katie sourced from a factory in Inverness which specialized in clothes for hillwalkers and mountaineers.

“What I hadn’t bargained for,” continues Katie, “was the demand from mothers at Max’s playschool for me to make similar clothes for their own children. At the time, we needed every bit of spare cash that we could lay our hands on, so the kitchen became like the Tailor of Gloucester’s workroom!”

One of her greatest aficionados, however, just happened to be the nine-year-old son of the chief executive of the Local Enterprise Company, a burly red-bearded Highlander called Rhuraidh MacLeod. Rhuraidh was a good friend of Patrick’s, having helped him on a feasibility study for an expansion plan for Seascape, so there seemed nothing unusual in his visiting their house one evening with a clump of papers stuck under his arm.

“He wasn’t there to talk about Seascape, though,” says Katie. “He wanted to talk to me about my clothes.”

Over a glass of whisky, Rhuraidh explained that there was a small clothes manufacturing unit on the same industrial estate where Patrick’s plant was based that had just lost its main customer, a large retail chain in the south that had decided to cut costs by moving its manufacturing base to Eastern Europe.

Quite right too, Dan thought to himself. I’d have done the same. He turned the page. There was another photograph, this time of a brooding young male model with thick brown hair worn fashionably messy and a crucifix dangling from his left earlobe. He was wearing a black T-shirt that fell well below the waistline of his open bomber jacket and a pair of trousers cut like army fatigues, their cuffs caught up on the padded tops of his Nike trainers. The image took up the whole page with the typeset of the article wedging the young man in from all sides. It was large enough for Dan to be able to make out a label with the name Vagabonds sewn onto the right-hand side pocket of the trousers.