Look, I’m not the Cerne Abbas Giant, if that’s what you think. You’re way out geographically, for a start. I have never been chalked, I am barely in any guidebooks, and I am not a renowned site of pilgrimage and ritual, or at least have not been for so long that to even talk about that would involve talking in an entirely different language which, even if it was translated into twenty-first-century English, would make little sense. Also – and I don’t mean this in a snide or judgemental way – some of us don’t feel the need to show off graphically and publicly about what we’ve got and prefer instead to occupy a position of quiet confidence about it. Each to their own, though. I hear he’s OK, the Giant. I certainly don’t have any personal beef with him, and am not attempting to start a feud. There is enough aggro and unrest in the world as it is. Especially on a moonlit night such as the one that has just passed.

Because the moon scrubbed the sky so clear, it was actually pretty cold in the early hours. But now the sun has burned off a light mist, all the world’s clouds are elsewhere, and we’re getting the flipside: the most perfect blue afternoon, hot without being stifling, a five-days-a-year perfect day. From my vantage point I can see vividly all the way to the coast, fourteen miles away, and that does not happen often. I have just watched five young friends edge their way down a deep crevice in the cliffs. Max is the leader. He has no shoes and has been walking with no shoes for so long that his feet feel nothing of the burrs and thistles and rocks and gorse needles beneath them. Then come Jemima and Annie: surfing, kayaking almost-hippie girls who talk with that laidback drawl common to all the kids around here whose parents have money and moved over from the south east a couple of decades ago. Hollie and Joe, both twenty-two, bring up the rear. They get on well, in a not deeply emotional way with Hollie doing most of the talking, and are in the middle of a lengthy discussion whose theme was originally graphic novels but has moved on to cheese. Hollie is still annoyed with herself for a grammatical slip-up in a message she sent last night, in reply to a sequence of persistent, politely complimentary and slightly poetic missives from an anonymous male, in which she wrote, ‘Hey, dude, I’m sorry but I have a boyfriend and I’m comfortable with the amount you are messaging me.’ The reason she wrote ‘comfortable’, instead of ‘uncomfortable’ – the word she intended to write – was that she had just burned her hand on the door of her mum’s wood burner. What she doesn’t know is that the sender of the anonymous messages was Joe.