They say it happens to everyone (they really like to talk, don’t they): that when you spend enough time with another person you’ll eventually start to resemble each other, even begin to dress the same and adopt similar speech patterns, your phrasing switching speeds until the cadence of “monumentally” or “effusive” is perfectly matched as it rolls off two separate tongues.

In our case, it didn’t take any time at all.

It started when we were listening to your mum describing a friend who went on vacation and spent the entire time staring at the ground. And this reminded me of when we went to Paris, and how when we told people we were going they all said the same thing—”There’s a lot of dog poop there”—and how we both thought that you’re looking in the wrong place in Paris if all you notice is the dog poop.

And we all tried to imagine what someone could think was on the ground, or hope was there, that would captivate their attention to that degree, and that’s when we both said, at the same time,

“Smurf village.”