Kenya and California were such a substantial part of your life. How often would you really want to be there, and would you want us there with you?

Yes. Of course I'd want you and them there. That's the half of the question I never actually answered, so let me answer it: yes.

Kenya is two separate things and I've been sloppy about running them together. The first is roots — I grew up there, my brother lives there and that isn't changing, and, inconveniently for the dignity of my argument, it also happens to be one of the world's great holiday destinations for extremely good reason. So I'd want our children to know it. Not as a pilgrimage. As the place their father came from and where their uncle lives.

The second is work, and I'll be straight about it, because that's the part that would actually take time. As I get back into serious projects, my skills and experience are precisely what's undersupplied there at the moment, and I'd be lying if I told you I didn't want that. But nearly all of it runs from here. And when I genuinely have to be on the ground it's an eight-hour flight — I can go, do the thing, and be home inside twenty-four hours.

Which is really the answer to what you raised on our very first night, before anything else: that you couldn't be the woman who eventually moved to Kenya. You won't have to be. It was never a plan. It was a piece of my history I talk about with too much feeling in my voice.

California is the same principle as the house. The anchor is my parents, and after them my sister — she'll inherit the farm, as she should, and I'm bound to her and her family. But the honest version is that what connected me to California was all of us being in one place at one time. Not California. Once a year at Christmas, and while my father is alive I want that maximised — which you got to before I did.