Basically," I say, "I’ve taken out the heart of my garden...

The plan is: we are moving. A field away from where we live now.

My heart had been having trouble catching up with our decision to move. But my mother’s putting paid to that, even though I’ve just put paid to it myself.

“Moving half a yard sideways,” she says on the phone, “I mean, what’s the fuss? And it’s not as if you’re leaving Downton, your ancestral home.”

“It’s just the garden,” I say.

“Put your favourite things into pots.”

“I have,” I say. “I’ve been winkling out hundreds and hundreds of tiny seedlings from the garden path with a kitchen fork.”

“What seedlings?”

“Granny bonnet, Dame’s Violets, Welsh poppy, Alchemilla Mollis and Moon-daisies.”

“Wonderful plants,” she says, “they just get on and do do their thing.”

“Oh — and the first thing I ever planted, the honeysuckle Emma gave me twenty years ago. Basically,” I say, “I’ve taken out the heart of my garden. It’s absolutely tiny but it’s the heart, nevertheless. It’s the tiniest heart, in pots.”

“And have you thought any more about what you’re going to build?” she says.

“Something light, bright and airy, out of Larch-wood,” I say. “I’m in charge of aesthetics.”

“Well I don’t suppose Dave minds what you build up there,” she says, “as long as he can cycle up a mountain and jump off it, he won’t mind a bit. I mean, if you built a rabbit hutch and put him in it, he wouldn’t notice.”

“David minding what we build up there would be an astonishing triumph of wishful thinking,” I say.

But mind he does. “So what are we thinking, in terms of our new house?” he says, limping over on his torn achilles and swinging up his black moon boot onto the kitchen table. He leans in towards my shoulder and looks at my laptop screen;

I have typed in ”Scandinavian self-build Victorian Nordic fusion interiors,” with some interesting results.

“That one is disgusting,” he says, pointing to an image of an interior that pleases me no end.

“Forget the stuff in it, look at the simple layout.”

“It’s hard to imagine the layout because of all the stuff in it,” he says.

“I like the stuff,” I say, “it’s the kind of stuff that looks as if it means something to the people whose house it is — the same kind of stuff we have in our house. ”

“I thought we were thinking simple.”

“Simple,” I say, “not Spartan.”

“I like Spartan,” he says, pointing at an image of a huge room with limed floorboards, white walls and not much else.

“That’s not Spartan,” I say, “that’s empty.”

“I like empty,” he says. I pause for a moment in order to unwish my wishful thinking.

If this is a discussion about aesthetics, which I think it is, it is the first we’ve had of it’s kind; I wonder what approach I might adopt to make it our last.

“So you like Empty Style?” I say. “How would you decorate that empty room? If you had free rein.”

“I’d put sofas in it.”

“What kind of sofas?”

“Comfortable sofas, not like your grandmother’s one that weighs a ton and can only fit a midget in it.”

“What colour are these sofas?”

“I don’t mind.”

“With aesthetics, you have to mind. In your case, you might have to learn the skill of minding from scratch.”

He looks into the middle distance, as if trying to remember the entire colour spectrum. “Red?” he says.

“Fire-engine red, blood red or darker than blood red?”

“Darker than blood red.”

“You’re absolutely sure about that? Darker than blood red?

“Yes,” he says.

“But definitely not purple?”

“Not purple,” he says.

“That colour goes by the name of ‘maroon,’ I say, “which is my worst colour ever, besides ‘flesh,” and “rust.”

“I thought you said I had free rein,” he says.

“I said, “if,” you had free rein,” I say, closing my laptop, “if.”