I can tell he’s trying not to smile. His piercing shifts as his lip twitches. And then he shakes himself and frowns again. ‘This could be someone’s life, someone’s livelihood. Peppermint Branches was important once, it really mattered to the community of Elffield, and you think you can snap it up on a drunken whim and lark about here until, what, the heels of your designer boots sink into the first cowpat, and then you can sell it on to the next idiot who comes along?’

‘These are Primark, not designer.’

He looks down at my feet. ‘I don’t know what that means.’

I go to start explaining but stop myself. I don’t think a Scottish pumpkin farmer is interested in the pros and cons of high-street brands. ‘I don’t want to sell it on,’ I say instead. All right, it’s not what I expected, but I wanted to do something that made me stop feeling like I was standing still waiting for the grief of my parents death to dissipate. ‘Why can’t I learn how to run a Christmas tree farm? When I started data inputting, I had no idea what I was doing, but I learnt. No one starts a job knowing exactly what’s what. This is a job like any other.’

‘This isn’t just a job. This is a life. Living and working on a place like this is all-consuming. This isn’t an office that you leave behind at 5 p.m. every night. You live it, day in, day out, 365 days a year, and no, you don’t get Christmas off. You don’t get holidays and pensions and medical insurance. You spend every day trying to keep these trees alive. You don’t look like the kind of person who’d be very good at keeping things alive.’

‘I think a séance might be the only way to help these. They’re already dead, look at them.’

He glances towards the area of dead branches on the opposite side of the road. ‘I wouldn’t worry about those, they’re the windbreaker fields. The northern fields are healthier. Marginally.’

‘Northern fields?’

‘Oh, for god’s sake.’ He gives me a withering look. ‘You don’t even know what you’ve bought, do you? You have a northern and southern patch of land. South.’ He throws a hand out towards the patch of dead-to-dying trees in front of us like I’m an imbecile. ‘Road.’ He stamps his foot on the tarmac like I don’t know what a road is. ‘House. Beyond house, trees. Yours.’

‘You Tarzan, me Jane?’ I say in an attempt at humour.

It goes down like a lead brick with an elephant tied to it. Probably just as well. The image of him in nothing but a loincloth is a bit too much for me.

‘You don’t know the first thing about trees, do you?’

‘Well, I …’