So was his worry about another problem. Every two weeks, Jamie was obliged to jump in his Subaru and make the tedious drive to Fort William to sign on for his benefits. Poaching wasn’t quite a lucrative enough profession for him to give up his dependency on those Jobseeker’s Allowance cheques, not to mention his housing benefit payments. And today was signing day. If he didn’t show up at the Job Centre to make his mark and verify that he was actively seeking work, etc., etc., then the Nazis in the dole office would give him grief and threaten to stop his benefits.

As Jamie ruminated over his problem, it suddenly occurred to him that his signing-on book, that all-important document required to demonstrate his feeble and mostly spurious attempts to find work, was sitting on his bedside cabinet in the trailer.

Jamie stamped about the bothy in a rage yelling ‘Ahh, fuck! Fuck!’ But stamp and yell all he wanted, he knew he had little choice but to venture back home for the first time in days, grab his signing-on book and hustle over to Fort William to keep the Nazis happy and the dole cheques rolling in. His duty done, he could decide afterwards whether or not to return to his hideout.

He packed up his stuff, tossed everything in the back of the Subaru, dusted the snow off the windscreen and managed to get the engine started. With a lot of sliding and skidding around, he negotiated the mile-long track to the main road, and set out towards Kinlochardaich.

He rented the trailer from the farmer who owned the neglected field half a mile from the edge of the village. At some point in the far-distant past the farmer had planned on turning the whole field into a caravan park but run out of interest after the first mobile home was installed, and for the last several years had been content to let Jamie live there as his sole tenant for £30 a week. Home sweet home was a solitary, lichen-streaked 25x10ft prefabricated box with a leaky roof and cracked windows, surrounded by a wasteland of junk and resembling a landfill on the inside.

Jamie ploughed the Subaru across the rutted, frozen field, parked up and tramped through the falling snow and up the slippery metal steps to his front door. He never locked the trailer, since the lock was broken and there was nothing worth stealing in there anyway.