Mr Mole is working from home. His mole children are home too, off sick from school in this wintry weather. Mrs Mole holds everything together. The fire is burning, cups of tea all round. Mole is tucked up in bed himself, a pile of paper on his lap. He has some stuff to catch up on, so he enlisted the help of his wife with copying out the Book of Numbers. That would have been fun but these numbers are 21, 19, 3, 9, and 18, and a whole lot more. In the thirty minutes of Marcon’s endlessly looped film, the Moles spend an infinity batting these figures from one page to another, interrupted only by the odd cough. Not even the mammals know why.

This is half cutesy, half absurd until one realises that little separates the animatronic moles from half of the world’s human population for whom rearranging numbers in a table is synonymous with survival. Idle work became indistinguishable from leisure, vegetative time-passing from family life. No wonder, then, that even the Moles seek meaning in the figures. The key, according to Marcon, is 566. But that number works only for him.