‘So. Once again.’ Simon offered me a hard stare. ‘What crap are we going to be wasting our time on this morning?’

‘Um, cutting out pictures and taking the other craft stuff and sticking it on these plant pots. Then you’re going to plant a seed, take it home and watch it grow, surrounded by your new vision.’

‘Ooh, that’s actually really symbolic,’ Saskia said. ‘I love cutting and sticking! It was my best subject at school.’

‘I’m missing a board meeting for this,’ Simon droned, raising his eyebrows at Stephe.

‘Come on, old chap, we’re here now. Might as well get your money’s worth,’ Stephe said.

‘Oh, just one more thing,’ I added, grabbing a bowl off the mantlepiece and holding it out. ‘It’s a no-phone activity.’

Simon sighed. ‘Well, there’d better be some decent booze.’

By lunchtime, the dining room table was a snowstorm of paper snippets, soil and pipe-cleaners. Hope had thoroughly enjoyed sitting in her highchair helping Simon create his vision pot, which had ended up covered in pictures of penguins, white glitter glue and hundreds of tiny foam snowflakes.

‘I just, you know, always loved penguins,’ he explained, chin wobbling. ‘Growing up, my bedroom was covered in posters of them. I adopted a pair of emperor penguins at the zoo, and they’d send me updates. I’d write back, and go and see them twice a year, and I swear they knew it was me. Peter and Penelope. Then, I dunno, exams and uni and work and before I knew it, we’d completely lost touch. Did you know,’ he paused for a monstrous sniff, ‘gentoo penguins mate for life. The male penguin finds a nice nest site, picks his woman, takes his turn when it comes to looking after the chick. A proper dad. A proper family. That’s all I wanted!’

Simon wrapped his hands around the plant pot, tears threatening in his eyes.

Of course that was the moment Daniel poked his head round the door. ‘I’m on my lunchbreak, so I can take Hope.’

He walked around the table, picked up his daughter, plucked a pink feather out of her hair and a snowflake off her cheek and left without any comment on the mess everywhere.

To my monumental relief, the doorbell rang to announce my crew had arrived. I showed Becky into the dining room, with an apologetic shrug, and hustled Alice into the kitchen to start prepping an organic, locally supermarket sourced, Damson Farm lifestyle-reconfiguring version of a kids’ party buffet.

I had never felt so exhausted. By the time they left, our guests had trooped back to the orchard to cover the basics of beekeeping with Becky, spent an hour baking honey bread, then lain on cushions on the living room floor and relearnt how to breathe before eating an afternoon tea incorporating the honey bread. While doing this, they had so often snivelled and grabbed each other’s hands in moments of revelation about how their life in central London resembled a hive, that by the time they left it felt strange not to have constant chatter playing on a loop in the background.