And then Silas said: “The sign on the road needs doing before the ground freezes.”

It is a four-foot board on two posts at the bottom of the gravel and it has said THORNE JOINERY since 2003 and I painted it myself with a brush I should not have used.

“It needs another name on it,” I said.

And he tilted his head down the way he does and said: “It needs the same name twice.

That’s the whole joke.”