Then dear old Dolly drove down from Essex to pay her respects. It was a brave effort because she hasn’t been anywhere for years and only once before to France, in the 1970s to pick grapes. She arrived at midday and immediately piled into the wine. The day was pleasantly warm enough to sit outside on the terrace.

I started her off on a Louis Latour Domaine de Valmoissine pinot noir and asked her what she thought of it. ‘It’s a nightingale by still water, Jel,’ she said, knocking it back in one. Dolly is exactly the sort of person advertisers are targeting when they add a click button peremptorily ordering you to ‘Shop now!’. She had brought down with her the perfect reactionary expat Christmas hamper: a litre of Tanqueray export gin, a double pack of Rich Tea biscuits, six bars of Green and Black’s milk chocolate, a bottle of Crabbie’s Ginger Wine, a huge pot of Marmite, a slab of smoked back bacon, a pair of kippers, a jar of cockles, a Christmas pudding and a walnut coffee sponge – which I fell on, tore open and cut immediately. From our terrace you can see for miles. ‘So how do you like Provence, Doll?’ I said. ‘Provence?’ she said, looking around her in consternation. ‘Provence? But I thought this was France!’

Her main objection to the idea that my health is wrecked by cancer is that it is not a good look. ‘It’s not like you, Jel. Not like you at all. You look like an old dodder, mate.’

Dolly’s news was mixed. For the past five years her son Gary has been growing cannabis plants under lights in the spare room of his east London flat. Seven plants, four crops per year, a kilo of buds per plant, £1,000 per picked kilo. A nice little earner in other words. For a substantial cut of the profits, a partner helped with the harvest and organised the sales. Come harvest time, this business partner would be accompanied by his much younger Thai girlfriend whose quick little hands were ideal for the intricate task of picking off the buds. They bickered constantly, these two, each treating the other as something of a joke. The partner insulted his girlfriend by mimicking a Phuket working girl’s stock catchphrases, such as: ‘Slow time or show time? Up to you.’ Or, ‘Sideways no jelly?’ And she in turn would mock his acquisitive temperament and arcane drug habit with: ‘He smoke pill and like money!’

It was a nice little earner for her son, yes, said Dolly. But not by any stretch of the imagination is cannabis farming a piece of cake. (‘Another piece of grace, your Cake?’ she added, reaching for the cake knife.) First of all there is that powerful and unmistakable stink, necessitating the continual running of extractor fans. And always the anxiety that a postman or delivery driver would notice and report it. Or the elderly neighbours in the flat next door. And because he could never have friends around, his social life deteriorated. His greatest fear, however, was not of the police but of the local power company, who apparently take no prisoners when retrieving the cost of stolen electricity.

Believe it or not, farming cannabis indoors is hot, sweaty, smelly work best done naked. Twice a day her son would strip off and enter the plantation to irrigate and tend his crop. And cannabis plants have an uncanny, malign presence that can tip an imaginative or oversensitive mind into paranoia, especially in those labouring alone. Dolly said that Gary felt their uncanny presence acutely and would get three sheets to the wind before going through the dreaded door to perform his twice daily duties. His life was reduced to sleeping, boozing and ducking about in the nude under his hated plants. He never went anywhere or saw anyone. You could say his £28,000 a year tax-free very nearly cost him his mental health.

So thank goodness and hurrah, laughed Dolly, reaching for the bottle, finding it empty, shaking it, for all of those thousands of young, fit Albanian men coming over on boats destined for dirty jobs in the cannabis trade. Why? Because thanks largely to them, about six months ago supply outstripped demand and the bottom dropped out of the UK market. The crash was so spectacular, Gary’s partner couldn’t give the crop away. End of. Gary burnt the harvest, flogged off the lamps and fans at a giveaway price, dismantled the electricity converter, repainted and refurnished the spare room, and took in a theology student as a lodger. ‘He’s a different person now, Jel. More relaxed.’

This called for a toast to retired farmer Gary. ‘What would you like to drink next, Doll?’ I said. ‘How about a nice white Château Marguï from just up the road?’ ‘You know very well, Jel,’ said this dear woman, ‘that what I’d really like right now is a nice glass of warm Blossom Hill.’

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