This would be the point when, under normal circumstances, a watertight defence re the matter of the car would have to be prepared, but the road is so terrifyingly narrow in places, it’s hard to work out how to keep all four wheels within its confines without either busting a tyre on the sharp rocky hillside or, worse, sliding across the pebbles that are scattered on the cliff edge like marbles and toppling into the abyss.

‘We can’t have our car, because Daddy’s got it.’

‘Why can’t Daddy bring it here?’

‘Because Daddy’s using it.’

‘Why can’t Daddy get another car and send our car here?’

An effortless and exhausting litigator, no statement is too trifling for Jack to take issue with. He argues every point to its ultimate conclusion with the dogged tenacity of a prosecution lawyer, which has the knock-on effect of making me feel culpable of some oblique crime I was unaware had been committed.

‘Come on, Jack, I like this truck. It’s fun to have a truck. Maybe one night we’ll sleep in it.’

‘Tonight, Mummy,’ Emmy immediately says, ‘can we sleep in it tonight?’

‘Well no, probably not tonight.’

‘You said tonight.’ Jack waits, glare intact.

What are my rights here? What constitutes the Miranda Escobar of parenting? There’s no question I can remain silent, but I’m equally aware that anything I say can and most definitely will be taken down and used against me. Jack is a startlingly beautiful child with pouting junior heart-throb looks. Unlike most eldest children who emerge from their mother’s womb, usually after a long and arduous labour, as hesitant, neurotic creatures, painfully reflecting their parents’ total capitulation to terror at their arrival, Jack, a controlling child even during pregnancy, announced his readiness to be born by breaking my waters on the dot of four a.m. (the shock of which sent Robert rolling from bed to floor amidst weary apologies, ‘Sorry, so sorry, was I snoring?’) and two hours later shot into the world as a supremely confident, fully functioning dictator.

And still he waits, his streaky brown hair flopping over one self-righteous eye.

‘No, I didn’t say tonight, Jack – I said one night. One night soon,’ I add for Emmy’s benefit.