It’s a glorious spring day on the edge of the Norfolk Broads and a rumpled, booming-voiced, snaggle-toothed fortysomething in a purple jacket and bright floral shirt – like a nicer, upper-class, English Sir Les Patterson – is trying to tell me how he made his unlikely and soon-to-be-vast fortune.

Unfortunately it’s quite impossible, surrounded as he is by excited eight- and nine-year-olds begging for his autograph and dying to tell him that his woodland theme park is the most brilliant they’ve ever visited. “Do you really think so? That’s nice,” he says, still mildly surprised by his own success.