The vigour with which Mr Pugnacious was mowing his lawn suggested that he was very deeply caught in the jaws of a tremendous debt. The debt (mostly to a woman named Dreardrie) had him by the ankles and he knew it. To be dominated by the physical weight of Dreardrie had been great. To be dominated by the weight of her debt? Well, that was not so satisfying.

As he mowed, his eyes couldn’t help but wander to the lawn of his neighbours, The Filfogs. Why did they always have the good lawn? It was a thing of beauty. He hated them for it, as well as their porch, which was new and very nice. Where did they get the money for renovations and extensions? They were adding value to their house. It was obvious that they were not in debt. They had equity.

Mr Pugnacious had once bathed in the glory of equity, however, he had squandered it borrowing against his house to finance a racehorse. The racehorse had been called Parisian Skirt, but after breaching the finish line of its first race, it simply carried on going and was last seen crossing the border into Switzerland.

As for the other investments of Mr Pugnacious, they had gone equally awry. He had shorted the US dollar because he didn’t feel that their foreign policy was aggressive enough and, in a fit of excitement, he bought an antique spear for six thousand pounds, only to discover that it was made of chocolate when it melted all over his fake Persian rug on a sunny day.

For all intents and purposes, Mr Pugnacious was not a man you’d even leave in charge of your dirty laundry.

And now? Here he was. Stood on his lawn, looking like a dopey imbecile of irrelevance and age. To some, age brought wisdom, respect, grace, dignity. To others? Bitterness, sagging around the eyes, belly fat, haemorrhoids, and the harsh reality of variable interest rates.

He looked down at his lawn. Patchy. Could he get nothing right?

That evening, he clambered headfirst into his air fryer and never returned, which is a shame because he won the post code lottery the very next day.