He walks over to the one I’m stroking, pulls a pair of secateurs from the pocket of his cargo trousers and deposits them in my hand. He nods to the tree in front of us. ‘There are a couple of strays that need to come off.’

‘What are you – an exam invigilator?’ I use my thumb to turn the metal catch on the handle and open the secateurs, snipping them in the air a few times before I attack the tree.

I surprise myself because I can actually see what he means. There are a few slim branches of fresh growth – soft, brighter green needles that have sprung out from the neat lines of the shaped tree, and I clip them off, feeling his eyes on me as I walk around the tree to ensure I haven’t missed any. ‘So is this part of the coursework and does it count towards my final grade?’

He laughs. ‘And that’s your first lesson as a Christmas tree farmer – never go anywhere without secateurs in your pocket, you will find strays that need to come off and you’ll never find them again if you walk away.’

I twist the two branches I snipped off with the sprigs of holly that are still in my hand. The colours are gorgeous together, the greens intertwining to make the red berries pop. It would make a perfect wreath with some pinecones and a couple of silver bells added.

‘You can keep those,’ he says when I go to hand the secateurs back to him. ‘They were Evergreene’s anyway, a long time ago. And I’m sorry about the trees. I know they weren’t mine to take care of. I’ve been trespassing onto your land for years.’ He winds his fingers in his hair and tugs at a dark lock. ‘This field backs onto one of mine so it’s been easy to slip through the hedge. I shouldn’t have, I know that, but I couldn’t sit back and watch them die when I knew how much they meant to Evergreene. He’d spent the last twenty years of his life working on them.’

His tongue must be twiddling the piercing because it’s turning in his lip, and I find that I don’t really care about anything else. Maybe it has some kind of hypnotic power. ‘You keep saying “we” – you were involved too?’

‘Just the leg work, the planting, the heavy lifting. It was his science and his knowledge of Christmas trees. I’m not that clever.’

I watch him as he chews on his lip. He’s definitely being modest there.