I add to it every year and wonder each year if it’s reached its conclusion.My twin US grandsons live in California and they visit us once a year generally around their birthday in the Summer. Some years ago I made them a cardboard city. Loads of old boxes collected through the year and saved for new architectural delights.

The architects are the boys themselves helped at times by thier two cousins, the boys from Yorkshire. We cut out bits of card and before they come I get busy with a scalpel and will cut out windows here and there. The whole thing is quite large now and has yet to go for recycling.

They were just as absorbed this year as last, and our additions included the Ellie Hotel, as well as a tram car and rail made by one of them from card and masking tape, a fine piece of construction. Will he be an engineer? Too soon to know, but he did it all himself with no input from me at all. The other is perhaps more of a marketing child, thinking up the slogans and suggesting what’s going on in the city. It was he who suggested the hotel for the mildly balanced lifestyle.

Their cousin did his own version of a building which had the feel of an eccentric Spanish architects work.

The youngest concentrated on parking cars.