I know. I find it curious too. It’s happened, and I don’t know why. I have definitely changed and feel that change inside of me, whatever inside of me is. Lately I have experienced a desire to eat grass.

See that barn wall down there, the ruin? I hate that. I don’t know why I hate it, because it’s actually a very attractive bit of wall, where you can still see evidence of some skilled brick nogging, but I hate it. I have just remembered a phrase of Reka’s, ‘jump the sun’. It was what she said she used to say a lot when she was about to record a song: ‘Let’s really try to jump the sun with this one!’ I feel like that is what we are doing, all this way up here, right now, jumping the sun. I think that is what I will call my biography of Reka when I finally get my notes together. Jumping the Sun: the Wild Life and Times of Reka Takacs. I think it is better than my original title, Dreamweaver.

I feel you feel that way about the barn too. I have felt you feel it every time we have walked past it, ever since I started to feel things. And I agree: that is a better title. Do you definitely think you have enough material to write the biography?

I think I do. I have the journals, and, although they’re very sporadic, there’s a lot there. I know I only met her when she was already in her eighties but we became very close. I think it’s an amazing story: her childhood in poverty in Hungary, the crude yet somehow haunted and alchemic early songwriting, her and Martin’s move back to Eastern Europe, the way the two of them popularised the work of McKendree, her more solitary period, the attempt to capture the sound of falling dust on record, the animal rescuing and prize-winning horticulture. There will be gaps, of course. She would never talk much about her time at the house where she lived with Maureen, where my grandfather was conceived, apart from the garden. I know Maureen died and Reka still found it very upsetting to think about, all these years on. I know the village gravedigger had once lived in the house, which I suppose makes the place even more dark in my mind now, although the building is now no longer there and the land it was on has sort of been subsumed by the big house next door. But, look, gaps are OK. It gives the reader the opportunity to tell some of the story in their own way in their own mind. Reka said Martin worried that his biography of RJ McKendree had too many gaps in it, but when it finally came out, after Martin died, a lot of people thoroughly enjoyed it.