“I believe you’ll find this one is your fault,” I say with as much dignity as I can manage, as I attempt to extract myself from the tangle of limbs. As he is doing the same thing our efforts rather cancel each other out and we don’t get very far. “You were too busy talking to listen to me and then there was a dragonfly…”

“Oh, there was a dragonfly. Well, that explains everything then,” he mutters.

I put a firm hand on his chest and he stills beneath my fingers. I roll to one side so that I am lying on my back beside him. The sky resolves itself overhead and I find myself squinting up into the sunshine. I close my eyes for a second. When I open them, I realize Ben still hasn’t moved.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

“I think so.” His voice is resigned. “No blood this time, at least.”

I pull myself up and look down at him. There’s something staining his blonde hair. “Don’t be so sure,” I say. I run my fingers through his hair, looking for the injury, and they come away red.

He looks startled. “Really?” he says. “Again?”

“I can’t see anything wrong,” I mutter, still looking for any obvious wound. Puzzled, I look more closely at my fingers, rubbing them together. There is red on my dress too. Then, in a flash, the truth comes to me. “Oh, it’s just paint!” I grin down at him, and the sudden rush of relief makes me laugh. “See?” I hold out my gory hands to show him.

“Paint?” His whole body tenses. “PAINT?” He leaps to his feet with a rather startling roar, that only intensifies as he takes in the scene in front of him.

I, too, scramble up. “Oh dear,” I say.

It seems that the can Ben kicked over contained a quantity of red paint, which, when mixed with the water from the jar that has also been knocked over, has created a rather alarming red trail, streaming merrily along the paving stones towards us. Ben’s painting, now lying on the floor thanks to my desperate grab at the easel, is worryingly damp with a long red smudge running almost horizontally across it – I’m fairly sure that wasn’t there before.

Ben stares at the canvas, open-mouthed.

“Perhaps it’s not so bad,” I say at last, reaching down to pick up the painting and place it carefully back on the easel.

“You have put it upside down.”

“Really?” I ask, squinting at the picture.

“This is all your fault,” he says, snatching the painting up and turning it the right way round. “I never know what disaster you’re going to unleash upon me next.”

That’s not really fair, but I don’t want to argue the point. “Shall I help you to tidy up?”