Clifton Nurseries garden centre is a delightful west London sort of thing nestled among grand stucco houses near the canal in Maida Vale. There’s a little shop of expensive notebooks and candles and wellies, and a tasteful café in the conservatory. An older lady shuffles in ahead of me and is warmly greeted by all the staff, who haven’t seen her for a while. A couple in wingback armchairs are doing crosswords companionably on their phones. The grand woman in the middle of the room is loudly organising her dear, dear friend’s celebration of life on speaker phone.

When Tom Hollander arrives and joins me on a wooden bench at the back of the room, which I’d hoped might be quietest, no one seems to notice. Either this is a place where actors routinely lunch, or everyone here is performing their own play. In two and a half hours I don’t see anyone pushing a wheelbarrow or buying plants.

“Quite nice, isn’t it?” he says. “When I lived in Portobello, this was the garden centre. And before that I lived in Bayswater and this was the garden centre, so I came here a lot to buy plants, which then died in their pots.” Now he lives in the country with “quite a lot of garden”. He promises to return to the topic of the garden but we get distracted by the business of acquiring food.