Five minutes later I was feeling a lot more ready, as the car inched around the curve of the driveway.

‘On second thoughts, maybe I should walk. It’ll definitely be faster.’

‘But also colder,’ Henry replied, eyes fixed on the icy gravel. ‘And not so safe on the motorway.’

‘Okay, fine, but can you speed up at all?’

‘Would you like to drive?’ he asked, face an innocent mask.

Deciding to call his bluff I said yes, and to my amazement he stopped the car (it didn’t take much) climbed out and walked around to the passenger side.

I could hardly back down now, so I slid across to the driver’s seat and started the engine, wondering whether I should mention that I hadn’t sat behind a wheel in years.

Two minutes later, as we skidded across the last few feet of the driveway, spinning in a slow arc until lurching to a stop facing back up towards the house, I blurted it anyway. ‘I’m so sorry, I haven’t driven in years!’

Henry said nothing, instead clambering out of the car and walking carefully back to the driver’s seat. I slunk back into my rightful place, waiting for the smug recriminations followed by a maths lecture about the impact on stopping distances per millimetre of snow. Instead, he steadily manoeuvred the car around, before turning to me and saying, ‘Full speed ahead?’

Once we’d crunched down the forest lane, with no further protests from me about how slowly Henry was chugging along, the main road was, as we’d predicted, much clearer.

‘Some music?’ I asked, not sure how else we were going to pass the ensuing hours. Henry clicked a button on the steering wheel and the car filled with classical music.

‘Or not,’ I added, after a full twenty seconds of one lone clarinet’s mournful toots, plugging my phone into the music system.

‘Please, no.’ Henry grimaced over the first few bars of Wizzard’s Christmas hit. ‘Anything but that.’

‘Anything but this song, or anything but Christmas songs?’ I might have chosen my Christmas Classics playlist as another test of Henry’s current state of Henry-ness, but if he’d been prepared to participate in an Armstrong Christmas, he couldn’t possibly hate all seasonal music.

I flicked onto the next song, ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’.

‘Anything but these types of Christmas songs,’ he not-so-helpfully clarified.

‘What does that mean? Happy ones? Ones that mention Christmas?’

‘Ones that any old chump who picks up a guitar can thrash out and end up winning a talent show.’

I looked at him, taken aback. ‘Are you making a dig at Adam?’