This is always exciting, as it allows me to stop work, read the email, think about the email, reply to the email, then do another little bit of work until the next email arrives. I scrutinise it with interest.

Later, I am chatting to Short Tony.

“Did you know,” I ask him, “that on the twenty-first of December 2004 you perpetrated a contextually affected shared joke?”

He looks at me in some bewilderment.

“That means in essay language that you shouted at the Cheerful Builder when he was on the roof. My Private Secret Diary is being studied by some students as part of their mock A-level exams.”

“You what?”

“They are writing essays about us.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I received an email from a boy called Zach. He got an A-minus, you know,” I added, proud of my new friend’s achievement in a fatherly type way, and conscious of my responsibilities as a role model. “I have already replied to him to advise not to take knives into school.”

“And they say A-levels are dumbing down.”

I am very pleased with my new status as a literary figure in the classroom. I have always regarded myself as a bit akin to people like Wilfred Owen and William Golding (without all that stuff about the flies), and now my work is regarded by one of the government’s official English teachers as being just as good as them and Shakespeare etc.

I exchange a couple of emails about this with my new friend Zach. But am a bit careful as there is a fine line between ‘engaging in email conversations with people still at school’ and ‘grooming’ and I would not like people to get the wrong idea – although I am hardly one of those dodgy people who hides behind a fictitious identity and is coy about giving out their real age.

It is a bit of an odd experience to be studied. But it is quite nice, and if it carries on then it will make it very easy to help Baby Servalan with her homework. I did not do very well in my own exams at school, and I am proud that by going to the Village Pub, playing bowls etc. I am helping to educate the youth of Great Britain.

The table is, in many senses, unremarkable.

A dining room table is a dining room table. It would live in the dining room. One would dine at it. It has a certain post-war English style about it; I study it casually, taking in the craftsmanship and its history, but my mind is elsewhere.

The LTLP’s mother and father purchased it when they got married. It was – I guess – some financial undertaking for them. By no means well-off, they could easily have done with trays on the lap, sat in the lounge in front of the space where the telly would one day be introduced. But a decent dining room table was more than a piece of wood for eating on. With its purchase, they bought an object considered to be the heart of family life. An English dining room table. Respectability.

Decades later – a couple of years back – they gave it to us. Passed it on, down a generation.

We haven’t yet used it as a dining room table, not having a dining room an’ that. But its time is almost nigh. The farmhousey kitchen is almost complete – a space to chat, cook and dine whilst looking out on lupins and hollyhocks across the eighteen-inch windowsills. First dinner guests will, I guess, be the LTLP’s parents. Life is cruel like that.

The teak is smothered in dust from the building work, but there are no scratches to speak of. This is down to my bright idea of keeping it in the bedroom, safely away from the dripping plaster and flailing chisels of the Methodical Builder. Safe it has been, and safe it is.

I stand on the new area of floor, where the stairs previously wound their way up into the room at the foot of our bed. Now the staircase has been demolished and moved elsewhere; the narrow and ancient sub-five-foot high doorway on the bedroom’s South wall is the only means of access.

The Methodical Builder watches me as I hold my head in my hands, rocking slightly from side to side.

The table is safe. Because I have bricked it up in the bedroom.

It is smothered in dust, there are no scratches to speak of – but I now have to saw its legs off to get it out. Or eat dinner in the bedroom. But I would like to fit a bed in there at some point. I let out a long, long sigh; the table has survived recessions, conflict, removal men and builders, but has finally been defeated by the forces of fuckwitdom.

“Well it can stay there for now,” comments the Methodical Builder.

I stomp from the room and compose some words with which to break the news to the LTLP.