I’d thought that his brother Theo at least might see what I was getting at. He’d commented that it looked like one of his old Meccano sets and I’d said, ‘Yes, exactly, lovely, isn’t it?’, but he’d meant it as an insult. Then I had taken it into the presence of the Great Man himself, Alan Martello, my father-in-law, the patriarch of the Stead, and it had been a disaster.

‘What’s this? The metal frame? What about the thing that’s going to be built around it? Can’t you do a picture of that as well?’

‘That is the building, Alan.’

He’d snorted through his grizzled beard. ‘I don’t want something that’s going to have Swedish architecture critics buzzing round it. I want a place for living in. Take that piece of paper away and build it in Helsinki or somewhere far away like that and I’m sure a publicly funded committee will give you a prize. If we’ve got to have some bloody building in this garden – of which I’m far from being entirely convinced – then what we’re going to have is an English country house, with bricks or dry-stone walls or some decent local material.’

‘This doesn’t sound like the angry young Alan Martello,’ I’d said sweetly. ‘New styles of architecture, a change of heart, isn’t that the sort of thing you’ve always been keen on?’

‘I like old styles of architecture. I’m not young. And I’m not angry any more, except with you. Replace that structuralist horror with something I’ll recognise as a house.’

It was Alan at his most gruff, charming, flirtatious and I was grateful that he’d felt able to yell at me in the old affectionate way while I’d been in the process of divorcing his son. So of course I’d gone away and put together a plan of impeccably rural appearance, complete with a rather amusing gambrel roof. It was designed in the sense that you design the contents of your shopping trolley as you walk around Sainsbury’s. The prefabricated frame construction house was Norwegian, though manufactured in Malaysia. Alan would at least have been grateful to know that the extraction of the raw materials probably involved the destruction of a small patch of rain forest.