Finance is seldom romantic. But the idea of peer-to-peer lending comes close. This is an industry that brings together individual savers and lenders on online platforms. Those that want to borrow are matched with those that want to lend.

A mistake in the kitchen one day, and while the rest of the household sup on the golden broth of a cockerel, out comes a bowl of thin, snottery gruel for Mhairi.

That field is their football ground and the detached house is their library and recreation room.

It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains of madness which he crossed […]