‘I think I prefer the company,’ Henry replied, focused on trying to chop his cremated potato skin.

‘At least we’re warm and managed to get something hot to eat.’

‘Hot?’ Henry eyed my cardboard container.

‘At least we managed to get something lukewarm to eat.’

‘What’s the plan, then, boss? Do we hang out here until morning?’

‘Seems like the best option.’

At that moment, the double doors opened and what must have been a coachload of men streamed in. They were all wearing football tops and around half of them were carrying cans of beer. They moved like a swarm of flies towards the long-since-sold-out burger outlet, but once they heard the bad news they began breaking off into smaller clumps, odd couples staggering about in circles with their arms around each other singing. Another group started working their way around the tables asking if anyone had any beer, whisky, food, or weed.

‘Come on, yous lot!’ a particularly red-faced older man shouted. ‘It’s nearly Christmas, let’s have that festive spirit. We’re all in this together, might as well make the most of it!’

He then started singing ‘Wonderful Christmastime’, only he couldn’t remember any of the words beyond the first line, so he sang that over and over until one of his companions swore at him to shut up and gave him a shove into a Christmas tree. Both the tree and the man ended up knocking over a young woman, and things only got worse from there.

Henry did a quick search on his phone. ‘Then again, that shack is only three miles away.’

And so it was that after a grovelling phone call by me, followed by Henry phoning back to do some bargaining in his rigid robot voice, we found ourselves taking the next exit off the motorway and crawling along relatively empty roads to the ‘enchanting cottage’ in the absolute middle of nowhere.

It was now early afternoon, dusk would be settling in a couple of hours, and all I wanted was to be somewhere warm and dry, with a chair to sit on and no drunk men demanding I join their conga line.

The shack was dry, I had to give it that.

There was also a whole sofa.

No drunk strangers – always a bonus.

I did, however, realise that there were a few more things I wanted after all.

We pulled up outside what I supposed was built to resemble a log cabin, but in reality, as we’d seen on the photos, looked more like a tumbledown shed. Apart from another, smaller wooden structure to one side, it was surrounded by snow-coloured fields and not a lot else. The rental agent who we’d managed to get hold of had given us the code for the key safe, which was helpful. Less helpful was finding the key safe empty.