‘Well my thinking was – I don’t mind telling you now this is clearly not going to happen – my thinking was, I’d bow to pressure and not erect the windmill, which I didn’t want to see on Hamble Hill anyway, but in the afterglow of warm feeling to me, the compassionate landowner, I would sneak by plans to sell off some land by the Lar, very near Spodden’s Hatch,’ he said.

‘How near Spodden’s Hatch, and what for?’ I demand to know.

‘A small, er, carbon-neutral, um, solar-powered…’

‘Yes?’ asks Sir Michael. ‘Get on with it, old bean, stop blinding us with all this ghastly green science, I can’t tell you how bored we all are with it.’

‘A housing development,’ Ned admitted. ‘A small one, very sympathetic to the landscape, and completely sustainable, not that it matters now, though,’ he says, with heat. ‘I’ll never get it now! Will I? Now I’m actually paying the Spodders market rates to live on my own land. Bloody hell! Sodding little… tinkers! Since when did land ownership come to mean stewardship? What the fuck is coppicing, anyway, and why is it suddenly so important? Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Why have I ended up supporting a whole bunch of hairy rancids, instead of exploiting them? It’s against nature.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ says Sir Michael. ‘We all do that. It’s called the price of privilege, old chum. Property is theft and all that.’

‘Privilege? And what do I know about privilege, I’d like to know?’ Ned expostulates. ‘I’ve spent my entire life unblocking my tenants’ chimneys, clearing their drains and going to their endless children’s endless christenings. All I ever wanted to be was a documentary filmmaker. But I’m a sort of general factotum instead. I’ve had to live in a crumbling ruin with my mother round my neck all my life, worrying about the roof. I can’t even sell off a little bit of land to pay for the rewiring. I can’t have any life of my own, and I can’t even pass on the estate to the son who might make something of it, Little Ned, who has just the combination of nastiness and greed necessary to get rid of the tenant farmers and make something of the estate. I’ve got to hand over the whole shebang to the son who’s on no-speaks with my wife and wants to turn the place that’s been in my family for four hundred years into a vegan commune run on dung. It’s a total harry balls-up.’ After his long wail he puts his head in his hands.