For a few years, reporting on the John Lewis Christmas advert - specifically, the musical element of it - was a major part of my professional calendar. I spent the best part of a decade as a pop music journalist on the arts desk of a broadsheet newspaper, occasionally doing glamorous/awful things such as flying to New York for 24 hours to grill a pop star about their love life or dancing with Lady Gaga in a working men’s club. More often, I would coerce grumpy middle-aged music critics and pretend that I was more abreast of celebrity scandal than I usually was.

In the first half of the 2010s, intrigue over the Christmas advert for John Lewis reached such a fever pitch that Nu Rave darling Ellie Goulding wound up performing her John Lewis Christmas advert song (a cover of Elton John’s ‘Your Song’) at Kate and Wills’ wedding reception. This combination, of unlikely pop sweetheart plus beloved Radio 2 ballad, could change career trajectories and pop charts. Hence why I participated in the surreal annual tradition of sitting in the John Lewis headquarters, my phone swapped for a John Lewis-issued pair of headphones, listening to the track that had been cooked up that year.