And Lorna Renfrew — to her enormous credit, and it is the only credit I will extend to her in this — did not pretend not to understand the question.

She made us both a cup of tea and sat down and said: “I thought I was getting you through the week.”

Then she gave me about fifteen minutes of it, without once crying and without once raising her voice, and I am going to represent it fairly.

She said that she had sat in two meetings in which a woman she loved was described in the third person by strangers, and that she had watched her son go grey, and that at some point on the Wednesday she had made an assessment.

She said: “You had lost four litres of blood.