He then told me how he’d ranked his own grandchildren in order of preference. At the top of the list was Maisie, eight, who wore a severe side part and had won the role of Mary in the previous year’s Christmas pageant, despite strong campaigning from the parents of two other girls. At the bottom of the list was Eden, five, who had once eaten a bar of soap.

‘I mean the whole thing,’ Roger said. ‘He didn’t eat a bit and stop. He ate the entire thing. Was burping bubbles.’

Eden had also dropped his pants in the school playground, unprompted. Roger worried that this might be an indicator of future depravity.

‘I’ve told my son: Drive to the middle of the bush and push him out of the car. He won’t listen. Doesn’t listen to a word I say.’

He was joking, of course. My office was full of the nicest people I’d ever known. I worked for Raleigh, one of the largest defence, aerospace and security companies in the world. I had a PhD in engineering. I’d spent a number of relatively measly years in the university’s engineering department, working on robots, or what passed for robots; nothing that was going to pass the Turing test. We’d had to scramble and scheme for every grant, every dollar of funding, and I had to renew my contract every six months. I felt like one of those seagulls fighting over the cold chips thrown by tourists. People were only too happy to enter into bitter, decades-long feuds. These fights were often the only thing sustaining their work after the money and accolades dried up.

At Raleigh, there were no such problems. It was nice to be where the real money was. There was plenty for everyone and so the atmosphere was genial. I’d never known such camaraderie as I found when I started designing weapons for a living.

I was part of the air-to-air missile team. We were working on an updated version of our signature AAM, the Raleigh Starling, refining the design and placement of the attitude thrusters – tiny, outward-facing rockets that fired when the missile needed to change course.

In the longer term, Raleigh hoped to develop a missile that could turn in midair and fly back to its target at more or less the same speed. The goal was to increase the no-escape zone. This is exactly what it sounds like, and was a selling point when it came to taking our product to Poland, the UK, Kuwait, Japan, Qatar.

Roger had no qualms whatsoever about designing weapons that could cause massive, instant carnage. I knew this because, unprompted, he told me. It was my first week, and I was in the staff kitchen heating noodles in the microwave. He was on his way back from lunch. He stuck his head into the room.

‘I think your ramen days are over, don’t you?’