‘Have you read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson? Read it. Drop anything you are reading now and read it instead. It’s your duty as a human being. She was dying of cancer when she wrote it but she cared so much about the planet she still went ahead and did it. She saw the future, and the destruction industrial farming was doing, the mindless greed of big businesses, and that was in 1962, and now it’s more than thirty years later and people are STILL not seeing the future. We are breaking the fine threads that bind life to life and the results are going to be pissing catastrophic.’ He was really gaining steam now and I was struggling to keep up, struggling to reshape him from what I had known him as; it wasn’t all that long ago that our primary topic of conversation was the escape shots Seve Ballesteros played when he was stuck behind a tree. ‘It all started getting bad in the Second World War. People experimented with new chemicals to make weapons and then we started using the same chemicals to blast tiny creatures to hell, just so we could grow even more wheat, expand the monoculture, make the countryside look even more uniform and dull. Look at the names they call these things. They make sure they’re long and hard to remember, because if they are people are less likely to address what they actually are and the terrible harm they do. Golf. Agribusiness. It’s all a part of the same giant disease. Waste and indulgence and humans acting like greedy, suppressive gods. What do you do with your plastic when you’re done with it?’

‘I put it in the bin in my kitchen.’

‘Of course you do. That’s what everyone does. But where do you think it’s all going? Do you think it just vanishes? I’ll tell you where it’s going. Out there.’ He pointed towards the waves, and the stone arch, and I pictured that apocryphal whale my dad had told me about, blasting through the stone then gobbling the container that had formerly held the takeaway sandwich I’d bought from the Newton Abbot branch of Boots on Monday. ‘What are you doing a week on Sunday?’

‘Nothing, I think.’

‘Good. Fancy coming to the Quantocks? We’re going to mess up one of the hunts up there. Stags, but probably foxes too. It’ll be different to today. More risky. People get hurt sometimes. But there’ll be more of us. The American will be there. Rory, too. I know some very excellent people. You’ll be fine.’

‘Er… OK.’