The village was, shall we say, not as picturesque as I’d been expecting. There were some older, cottagey type houses along Old Main Street, but the row of shops was a 1950s eyesore, and looked as though the only fresh paint it had received since then was graffiti. Along with the Ferrington mini-market was a hairdresser featuring faded posters of women showcasing their eighties’ perms, the pizza place that Daniel had been to the other day, a Greggs and an off-licence which also advertised ‘cheapest vapes on the Old Side’. The only vapes on the Old Side, I would imagine. There was the Old Boat House pub that advertised a riverside garden and local sausages, and a miners’ social club that looked like a cheaper version of the pub. Opposite all this was the dinkiest, quaintest old-fashioned church I’d ever seen.

So maybe not quite picture postcard, but at least there was no air pollution, hardly any litter, and I could hear ducks quacking along the riverbank.

I went straight into the shop, loading up as much as I felt able to hang off the back of the pushchair – a fairly even mix of cleaning supplies and food. The selection was basic, to say the least, and they had completely run out of bananas.

Not to worry. We had a good hour or so before it started to get dark, and that gave us an excuse to cross the river to try the shops on the New Side.

Or not, as it turned out. The bridge, which stood in between the pub and the shops, was blocked off with concrete barriers, low enough for me to see that the stone structure had completely collapsed in the centre, leaving a gap of several metres where the Maddon flowed thick and grey beneath it.

I checked the maps on my phone, but couldn’t spot another bridge anywhere in the village. A woman was scurrying up the road towards me, head down, woolly hat pulled low and chin tucked into her scarf.

‘Excuse me?’

She jerked briefly to a stop, shaking her head at the pavement before hurrying past and into the off-licence. The rest of the street was deserted, so, quickly deciding to dismiss her strange response as perhaps mistaking me for a chugger, I followed her in.

Wow. It was like stepping into a nightclub, more like the kind of place I’d expect to find back in London than a rural village in the East Midlands. All the shop fixtures – the display cases, floor and counter, plus the walls and ceiling – were black. Backlighting caused the rows of spirits to glow in varying luminescent shades. In the centre of the room a glitter ball spun, pinpricks of light whirling around it. Techno music pumped from enormous speakers hung in the far corners, and behind the counter a man dressed all in black bounced his baseball-capped head slightly out of time to the beat.

‘All right?’ he asked the woman who’d entered before me, without breaking his stride. He looked about the same age as my dad, with a long, bleached ponytail dangling beneath the cap and a pair of headphones the size of grapefruit around his neck.