She’s about to reply, but he’s on his way and beckoning for her, or perhaps both of us, to follow.

‘Just down here,’ he says, his hand on the stair railing. ‘Just in my study.’

She turns to look at me, but the momentum already has us both following him down there.

‘Forty years of stuff here,’ he says as he pushes the door open. ‘Some might say junk, but they’d be very wrong.’

Three of the four walls have built-in shelving, floor to ceiling, all piled with boxes and old toys. There’s even a shelf running above the door. Only the wall with a window is free of it, and it has a filing cabinet pushed up against it and, under the window, a workbench cluttered with tubes of paint, tiny brushes and pictures of a military uniform that Simon has downloaded, printed and made notes on. The bench is one of two. The room is Ellen Baker’s workshop in Girdwood, but without a commercial justification, all just for the deep eccentric love of it.

‘Lots of great stuff here,’ Simon says.

Lacy takes half a step back and puts her hand on my elbow, steering me in ahead of her.

One set of shelves holds ancient board games stacked in labelled clear-plastic boxes. Wedged against them is a set of worn brown hardback books, with the numbers one to five on their ribbed spines and ‘Wonderful Magazine’ in gold capitals on a burgundy background. Along the tops of the books, a classic London black cab drives in pursuit of a classic London double-decker bus, both toys meticulously restored.

On the bench below, next to a shelf of old cap guns and novelty tin money boxes, is a model warship with its single gun turret pulled apart and one of its two cannons in pieces. Its hull is grey to the waterline and an ochre red below it, but the paint is worn and flaked, exposing bare wood in some places. The deck and hull are dotted with rows of rivet heads, smaller than braille. I can’t tell if they’re real or not. A pair of tiny pliers and two screwdrivers of similar size have been left nearby on the bench, along with a tube labelled ‘Meccano Graphite Grease’.

‘That’s not just a model,’ Simon says, stepping over and putting his hand on the hull. ‘Definitely not a toy, in this case.’ He straightens the stand that’s on the bench near the ship’s bow. There’s a brass plaque on it that reads, ‘Canonicus-class monitor – 1863’. ‘It’s made from iron and deck timber from an actual Civil War monitor that was broken up in Philadelphia around 1900.’

On a nearby shelf, there’s a book with a cover I recognise, a montage of black-and-white boating sketches arranged like dropped photos against a green background. It’s a hardback edition of Swallows and Amazons.