Various errands including taking some of H’s garden clearings to the recycling centre. As I tip my bags into an enormous skip a man next to me says ‘You could make a garden out of all this.’ One of the staff comes up to ask me to move my car and seeing it’s me softens his approach. ‘Do you know Ken Loach?’ he asks. I mutter something about having met him a few times. ‘Well, he’s over there.’ And there indeed is Ken, heading for the garden waste.

‘A great leveller, this place,’ he says as we mount the platform and talk about the Cannes Film Festival – he’s got to go for a day next week – and the difficulty he’s having making a party political broadcast for the Stop the War Party. It’s not just that no one will give them any airtime, but that getting it right is so difficult – everyone has their own ideas of what should be said and how it should be said.

We’re deep in conversation when he looks up anxiously. ‘I’ve got my grandson in the car,’ he says and rushes – well, Ken doesn’t rush, he disappears – in a hurry. Britain’s best, most honest, most prolific director drives off in what looks like a Ford Fiesta.