I can’t pin down exactly what she did with what ingredients. I can’t even be sure that she really did the things I think she did. All I have, really, are pieces of circumstantial evidence and hunches that have coalesced over the years. In my narrative of suspicions, she preferred to use vitamin A (which can cause sleepiness, blurred vision, and nausea, among other things), then she used laxatives, and then, as she got older and lazier, she moved on to prescription drugs.

Grandma never cooked the same thing twice, and her creations were greasy beyond belief and usually really weird. For example: chicken baked with apricots and canned tomatoes, or mixed-up ground meats with prunes, or pickled things. She was infamous at the local grocery store. They saved the shark livers for her.

In the decorous company of sixth-formers or international businesspeople, Farage will insist he isn’t against immigration, or Europe, or Europeans – only against British membership of the European Union. Being anti-immigration, he has said, would be ‘moronic’. He says he wants a Switzerland-style trade relationship with the EU, and an Australian-style immigration system, based on points, with the world: fewer Polish builders, more Indian scientists. But this isn’t the message Ukip is putting out on the street, where, as Lord Ashcroft correctly noted, EU membership isn’t an issue. Immigration is. All immigration. Foreignness. Otherness. ‘Say no to mass immigration,’ a Ukip flyer in Thanet says. Rumours and urban legends about victimised indigenous Britons and pampered foreigners fly across the internet. Hate anecdotes in the right-wing press become generalised: if one foreigner is found to be cheating the system, there must be thousands like them, millions. Farage is the beneficiary. Ukip’s discourse isn’t so much a dog whistle as the full dog orchestra.