He was standing on the platform as the train slowly pulled into the station, the zip of his jacket done up beyond his chin, his hands thrust deep into its pockets, and a woollen hat, with Ski Aonach Mor emblazoned across its rim, pulled down over his ears. He looked down the length of the train at the unsynchronized motion of the doors being opened and slammed shut again, and watched as the drab-clothed mountain folk with their gaitered legs and crampon-festooned rucksacks disembarked from the carriages. And then into this fashionless scene stepped Millie and Nina, wearing such bewildered expressions and out-of-place clothes that it would seem they had just taken the wrong tube line from Notting Hill Gate.

By the time he reached them, the trailing hems of his eldest daughter’s baggy jeans were already seeping up the dirty brown water that lay an inch deep on the platform, and she shivered as she pulled her miniscule army jacket around her in a vain attempt to give her bare midrift some protection against the elements. Nina, meanwhile, stood with a set of earphone wires hanging limply from her ears, moving her head from side to side like a short-circuited robot as she took in her new surroundings. Her bright yellow bell-bottomed trousers had started the same osmotic process as those of her sister, while the wooly white collar of her purple Afghan waistcoat had begun to take on the appearance, and no doubt the odour, of a miserably wet billy goat.

“Hi there, you two,” Dan exclaimed enthusiastically as he opened his arms to give Millie a hug. She jumped away as if being set upon by a deranged sex maniac, her sudden movement almost displacing the pair of rain-spattered Oakley sunglasses that held back her short blonde hair.

“Dad, is that you?” she asked, her nose wrinkling up in disgust as she visually ingested his attire from head to foot.

“Of course it is. I haven’t been away from London that long, have I?”

“Why are you dressed like such a prat?”

Dan snorted out a laugh, realizing now why his initial meeting with Katie at this exact venue must have seemed like the first-time encounter of ET and its young earthling mate. “Don’t worry. You’ll soon find out.” He leaned over and gave Millie an unreciprocated kiss on each of her freezing cheeks before turning his attentions to Nina. He needn’t have bothered. She could have been set upon by that deranged sex maniac without even a look of surprise flashing across her sleet-stung features.

“Ni, aren’t you going to say hullo?” Dan asked, his head held to the side as he waited for some kind of reaction to their meeting.