‘It’s all ahead of me.’ He drinks some more water. ‘Hey, Jo-Jo’s keen to see you.’

‘Good.’ It needs more of a response than that. ‘I’m keen to restock.’

Semi-keen. I have almost run out of toolboxes, and Jo-Jo, Joseph Zhou, is no doubt itching to slip me another half container load. Easy money for him. And not exactly difficult money for me. The business keeps turning over, without much effort. The product is good, and the price, and the website is what it is, no frills, needing little attention. Perhaps there is a ‘road less travelled’ on which I was born with the entrepreneur gene, and leveraged my cheap toolbox access into an e-empire, spreading the cunningly sourced leftovers of Shenzhen across America. Jo-Jo has me booked in for a daytrip to Shenzhen on Wednesday.

‘He’s big on bento grass at the moment,’ Simon says. ‘So, don’t just think toolboxes. Open your mind.’

‘To bento grass?’ He is aware, somehow, that my mind is more closed than open. ‘What even is bento grass?’

‘It’s that green serrated plastic, like grass, that you get with sushi, and in bento boxes.’ He does a slicing motion with his hand, as if he’s cutting the individual grass blades in front of me. ‘Someone has to make it. Jo-Jo’s got the fourth-biggest factory in the world, he reckons. He actually owns the factory this time. He’s got nowhere near the US penetration he wants.’

A conversation has been had without me, and in it I became more ambitious. Or at least had different ambitions. The toolboxes make enough sense. I’m established, I have a close to five-star average, enough people find me. And enough people don’t that I’m no threat to any big importer selling branded stock, rather than overruns. It fits with my part-time real-estate job. It works for now, for this spot in life.

I thought a walk would help get me in the time zone, not take me to this reset we’re doing. He’s doing. This is not my post-CABG journey, in which I discover there’s been a massive park down the road all along.

‘You should think about it,’ Simon says. ‘At least do some research. It could be big.’

‘Sure.’ Strips of green serrated plastic in their billions, choking turtles after a working life that achieved nothing at all. Does someone have to make it? Really? ‘I’m serious about the degree, the history thing. And doing something with it.’

I’ve applied but I don’t start till summer. A BA in History at UAA, the University of Alaska Anchorage. Sometimes, I need to look up and see that there’s a horizon beyond toolboxes and an occasional house sale and the mechanics of each day. Skiing was the plan for so long that I didn’t have another. I can’t say, here and now, to Simon, ‘I’m going to teach history.’ That it’s something I actually think I want to do. It seems implausible this far away, on this humid day, with rich Hong Kong people visiting their ponies on the other side of the trees. He and I should connect better over history. I had hoped we would.