And then there’s the house I walk past every morning on my way to nursery. I don’t quite know how to read it: when we first moved into the street I thought it was a bourgeois experiment: large outwards-facing garden left to rewild. Yorkshire fog, cocksfoot, foxtail: grasses growing in clumps and tourbillons so that by the end of summer it was less a garden and more a series of tiny turtle-back islands.

Now, I’m not so sure it is a deliberate experiment. The grass rises and falls, a year-long breath. I have never seen anyone enter or leave the house. The garden sometimes looks slightly sinister: in early summer I thought this grass is tall enough to hide a body. But also, with the spring come round again, astonishing deep red tulips and dole queues of grape hyacinths the whole length of the back wall.

You see the metaphor working, almost.

PNR has always known the difference between an editor and a gardener. On my computer I have tedious back-and-forth archives, blood-pressure arguments with little-magazine Le Nôtres, all of them convinced that every evanescent quarterly issue has to be as trimmed and prinked as the parks at Versailles (and terrified to the tips of their full-bottom wigs of upsetting this season’s Sun King). I also have a few laconic messages exchanged with Michael: ‘Can I …?’ ‘Yes’, or, rarely, ‘No’.

This is how an editor should work. It’s not rewilding: PNR is not desperately trying to reintroduce the beaver. But it’s not neglect, either: the ground has been raked and sown and now the editor can ...