Now, I find myself having endless chats on internships, which I am told as line items on CVs, pay generous dividends.

Meetings start by me asking the aspirant intern their thoughts on indentured apprenticeships. To this, I invariably receive a look of bemusement and confusion. Confusion because separately the words seem perfectly familiar, but together seemingly odd; bemusement as to why either is relevant in the context of a professional office setting. So, I begin by setting the contextual scene of an agricultural community much in the past, but still in large parts present. In these, most smallholders farming the same cereals, fruits et al., must subsist on poor incomes when the crop is bad, and only little more bearable when the yield is good enough there is something to sell. Something to sell, yes, but because all farms have enjoyed the same “bountiful” harvest, prices are low. No surprise then that smallholders are keen to break the cycle and invest in one of their many children bred to help with farm labour. Spend, that is, on a carefully chosen child becoming a sought-after craftsman – blacksmith, carpenter, apothecary etc. – or indeed in animal welfare, whose artisanal income would be far less exposed to the vagaries of generally woefully unrewarding and unpredictable crop cycles.