The look on Ben's face is akin to the one he used to wear when teenage punks tried to explain what they were doing in the container yards at the Port of Aberdeen. Or, more recently, the expression he wore when a much younger Victor Fox told him exactly how many munitions they were going to smuggle over the North Sea and then over the Irish Sea.

It's one he's had a lot of practice with.

"So in order to affect a feeling of loneliness, you decided you needed to enlist the assistance of over a dozen people," he says, "and build a bridge to create something essentially depressing instead of leaving it as is and affecting a feeling of optimism."

He's just checking.