He casts his eyes across the field. ‘It’s not ideal, but you can. Thing is, and you have to understand this, everything you do for the next few years will be a way of trying to fix what’s happened to the farm in the years of being abandoned. These trees are overgrown and their roots are suffocated by weeds. You can dig up the weeds, but the damage is already done. They would’ve taken what they needed from the soil and prevented the trees from having it. They haven’t been fed so they’re missing the nutrients that make a healthy tree. The branches are thick and woody and growing haywire because they haven’t been sheared, and the optimum time to shear them is in the spring so they form new growth tips, and the summer gives the wounds a chance to heal without disease getting in.’

‘How about a nice Elastoplast?’

He laughs and then looks annoyed with himself for laughing. ‘I’m serious, Lee.’

Even Chelsea doesn’t call me Lee. I go to protest about him shortening my name, but he carries on before I have a chance.

‘You now have to prune them at the beginning of winter and they won’t have time to heal before cutting for sale – but you can’t sell them like this, look at the state of them, the poor buggers.’

They obviously look all right to Gizmo because he’s got his extending lead wrapped in some form of complicated bowline knot around several of the trunks and is now cocking his leg up one. ‘There you go, Gizmo’s helping with the nutrient situation.’

We’re both laughing as he finishes his business and walks around another tree, further entangling the lead. I look at the trees as Noel follows him, walking around trunks in an attempt to untangle the knot, like some kind of giant, forestial cat’s cradle game. Gizmo takes this as part of the fun and woofs at Noel, running off every time he gets close to him, circling through the weeds around each trunk, until the lead reaches its maximum length and Noel starts reeling him in.