Nina was never not in motion, never not hurrying somewhere. She tag-teamed with her husband Brent on dinner-and-bath routines. She read children’s books to Ronnie; she never read adult books anymore (or just ‘books’, as she used to call them). At best she read articles on her phone, scrolling mindlessly in the dark after checking her messages. She took her son on the tube to the co-working creche, which had an adjoining office where she could do a few hours’ work, always feeling there was never quite enough time to make a dent in her projects.

On the days Ronnie was in childcare she went to her agency in Shoreditch. They had rooms that she could use for editing and meetings. Most of her work was directing arty-looking TV commercials and documentary-style content. Lately she had worked as one of the directors on a TV series, a comedy about the trials of parenting. The show was irreverent and funny and a lot of people liked it. In the background, she was also labouring on a project of her own, a script for a feature film. This took untold hours of writing, with much plotting and re-plotting, and sometimes she had the feeling that it would never be finished.

In between meetings and the odd brief creative burst, Nina made calls about the Fox Situation. The landlady was being silly. Securing the bins – ugh. She tried that. It didn’t work. Researching online, Nina found the details of a fox rescue group that ran a catch-and-release program, but she ruled this out, guessing the foxes would return. She had started to get some serious side-eye from her neighbours, who saw her garden as a hotbed of fox activity. Her neighbour at number 40, a man with a military bearing, accused her of feeding them. Not knowing his name, she mentally christened him Old Gammon. He told her to have the foxes shot.

‘From those French doors of yours. There’s a man you can call for that,’ he said. ‘Get the nasty little Charlies. Wait till you hear them screaming in the small hours of the morning, that’s when they have intercourse,’ he told her with distaste.