My 8-year-old son gave up his lunch money to buy a little girl with Down syndrome a red dress—the next morning, our lawn was covered with lunchboxes, but what was inside the biggest one made him go pale.

Perrin refused it. Flatly, immediately, and with a look on her face that I would not want directed at me again.

We had that conversation in her kitchen on the Wednesday and it went badly. She said the words “I am not a charity” four times.

And she was right to. A woman who works twenty-six hours in a pharmacy and pays four hundred and ten dollars a set for her daughter’s programme does not want to be handed a bag of cash by a neighbour, and I had gone round there and done exactly that, badly, without thinking about it for one second from her side.

It took five weeks and three other people to sort out.

What happened in the end is that the money went to the provider — Wexham Early Intervention, who run the programme — as a designated fund, administered by them, that Perrin draws down against by just turning up and not being invoiced.