As he sits there in bed, that gorgeous, buttery light dancing across the floorboards, their new house begins to take shape in his head, his ideas gathering texture and colour. Quickly he grabs his notebook and pencil and begins to draw: the long right angle of the cliff, then a strange orb thing that sits half-in, half-out of the rock. Kind of nest-like; yes, a kind of hive. He recalls Aurelia staring up at the cliff from the fjord with her binoculars and noticing the jut of black rock. You could fit a house on there. The concept coheres rapidly: a three-storey house partially cantilevered over the fjord, and perhaps the rock itself forming the back walls of the house – ancient, million-year-old Norwegian cliff inside some of the rooms, still patterned with scratch-marks from the glacier that formed it. It makes sense – he’s wary of the land beyond Granhus, ruined by the river. But building on the rock – or in it – just might work.

How would he do it? He draws two lines that plunge down through the cliff to the bit that juts out. Then he stares at the drawing. He could hold the house in place with thirty-mm steel rods thrust down through the rock – thirty mm would be enough to bear the load if he drills deep, and it would also mean that the foundations don’t interfere too much with the landscape … The house will have seamless, electro-chromatic glass wrapped around the front façade, with the ability to change from clear to frost at the touch of an app, meaning that the house will, for the most part, blend into the rock. Nothing ostentatious, nothing to signal that the landscape has been imposed upon. Locally sourced wood will provide additional cladding and infrastructure – Siberian birch weathers to pewter-grey fairly quickly, so he could use that to provide both insulation and camouflage. The house will simply blend into the rock.

This time, this time, he’ll listen to his instinct. He won’t interfere with the land.