I flew home to tell my daughter off for wasting the money I’d been sending for five years. I found her at school eating half a bread roll — and then the counsellor told me she’d been registered as a low-income student since the year I left.

Eight months. That is what he had in his head in the March of that year — eight months of somebody else’s money to get that workshop turned round, and then he would put it all back and I would never know there had been a gap.

It was five years.

And when I asked him when he had realised it was not going to be eight months, he said: about the November.

The first November. Six months in.

Four and a half more years after he knew.

That is not a man who made a bad decision under pressure. It is a man who made one bad decision under pressure in the March, found out in the November that it had failed, and then made the same decision again every single month for fifty-four months because by then stopping meant telling me.

I asked him one more thing before I left that workshop and it is the question I actually went there for.