“I can’t believe we slept in a den last night, Dad!”

These were the first words to escape my daughter’s blue-tinged lips as she surfaced from her sleeping bag.

I looked up to see a small colony of mushrooms along the central beam above our heads. Spiders had been busy in the rafters and a smattering of rotten leaves were sprinkled across us. Our ramshackle Grand Designs project was still standing, though, and my fears of knocking out a supporting beam in the night and being crushed to death had thankfully not been realised.

Luna was wedged into my chest, staring through a hole in the roof as several hundred feathery locals cleared their throats. At some point during the night her sleeping mat had fired itself out from beneath her, leaving nothing between her and the forest floor but a picnic rug with the thermal properties of a Jacob’s cracker.

But she was smiling! We’d bloody done it. We’d walked out of school the previous afternoon, disappeared into the woods, built a house out of sticks and then actually slept in the bastard.

I looked down at this grubby, cold, magnificent little woodland creature curled into my arms and was walloped by an enormous surge of parental love.

“I love you,” I whispered.

She stared lovingly into my eyes.

Then her face buckled and she rolled away from me in disgust.

“Dad. Your breath STINKS.”

And with that, the magic was over.