‘It’s not much of a business if you don’t charge anything.’ Trev shook his head. ‘My niece paid a couple of hundred quid to sort her nervous lurcher.’

Yasmin stuck her hands on tiny hips. ‘Did she look like she can spare two hundred pounds on a professional dog trainer?’

‘Well, that’s beside the point,’ Trev said, frowning.

‘Precisely.’ Yasmin’s voice had risen again. ‘This isn’t about her. A dog needs help. Do you think I should sit back and let an innocent creature suffer, because their incompetent owner can’t afford to learn how to correct her mistakes? It’s not as though I’m starving and need the money.’

Trev scratched one of the eyeholes of his skull tattoo. ‘Well, when you put it like that…’

‘This is as much for my benefit as for hers,’ she went on. ‘I will not sleep, knowing a poor dog is suffering. I might even pay her to let me fix the problem.’

‘I don’t think that’s going to be necessary,’ I added. Yasmin might not be starving, but she definitely could do with the money. However, I did wonder whether it was wise, or even legal, to charge when she didn’t have any formal training. There might be insurance or a licence required. ‘She sounded pretty keen to have the training.’

‘That’s about right,’ Yasmin practically bellowed as she marched to the door. ‘It’s not the dog who needs the training. It’s virtually never the dog.’ She paused to yank open the door, her eyes roaming the room until they found Irene. ‘It’s the people who need to learn how to behave.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Irene huffed as Yasmin allowed the door to swing shut behind her.

Halfway through Trev’s session, a woman entered the library with a double buggy containing a screaming baby and a toddler. Shooing two older boys ahead of her into the tiny children’s section, she collapsed on one of the preschool-sized seating blocks, sat the toddler in front of the forlorn crate of toys and proceeded to start breastfeeding the baby.

Within moments the toddler had tipped the crate over, the toys clattering across the wooden floorboards. One of the boys was robotically pulling off every single book from the ‘confident readers’ shelf and his brother, who looked to be around seven or eight, had started spinning on his back in the middle of the spilt toys, sending them skidding under bookcases and off into the adults’ section.

The mum started pleading with her kids to choose a story, tidy up the mess, stop Holly chewing a book, please stop yelling, and please, please behave themselves so she could read them a story.