The house was a-buzz with DIY and related domestic projects. While my university friend SB hosed down the steps to our New Town basement, TPR dismantled the broken external door handle to take for repair by the locksmith. It was astonishing that we hadn’t been burgled in the fortnight that the door to the posh sitting room had lain open. A canny thief would have had a field day amongst our priceless antiques.

Meanwhile in the kitchen the decorators found a succession of wall calendars dating back three decades. They stacked them up, all ready for me to archive. Curious to see whether our lives had always been quite so busy I flicked through the calendar entries all the way back to the 1990s. I felt a wave of nostalgia as I reached that period when we seriously considered moving south to London.

Later in the day, when I was waiting for the slow (but reliable) plumber from Cambridge to arrive and install a brand new underfloor heating system, I watched the upstairs neighbour add to a growing pile of life-size metal-framed sheep statues in the street next to the communal rubbish bins. I wondered how I could secretly sneak them back into the building and home them in our flat. I really needed to discuss my tactics with someone else so I invited our landlady in for a chat over coffee. Politely she refused: sharing hot beverages with the tenants was liable to be classed as a perk of her job, and she couldn’t afford to take the risk of being taxed on taking breaks.