The top screen is held by tape

The desk is two IKEA Gerton tops, 155 centimetres each and 75 deep, sanded and finished over two weekends. The walls were painted in the same stretch, and the room was a mess for both of them. The slats behind the screens carry two carved panels, cut by hand by an elderly Vietnamese man he found online. They are acoustic panels, and they take the hard edge off the sound.

Three Prism+ screens stand above the desk, two of them side by side and one across the top. Each of the pair below holds two windows at a time: WhatsApp, email, AutoCAD and Teams. The one above plays Netflix most of the time, and a music player with a spectrum meter the rest of it. It rests on the two below and is stuck to the wall with industrial tape.

The keyboard and the mouse sit to the left, because the left screen is the one he works on. Under the middle of the desk are a Marantz PM6007 and a Sabaj A20d. The Sabaj takes the sound off the computer over USB-C, past the computer's own converter, and hands it to the amplifier, which has none of its own. A REL T5/x sits on a high level cable from the same amplifier. The speakers are Bowers & Wilkins 607 S2 AE, on IsoAcoustics stands, 18 centimetres off the wall, which is close for a rear-ported cabinet and has never boomed.

A Synology DS1819+ holds the music, the films and the photographs: eight bays, twelve terabytes in each. It sits on the desk, it is audible, and it stays there until somewhere better turns up. The computer beside it runs on soft tubing, chosen over hard tubing because his reading glasses kept slipping while he bent the pipe. A screen inside the case reads the temperatures.

He built his first computer in the Pentium era, at sixteen or seventeen, on the money from odd jobs and afternoons spent in computer shops. Three controllers wait under the left screen for nephews, nieces and friends. Beside them a winder turns two watches behind blue light.