In the cab on the way home, she says: ‘I remember the moment I fell in love with you. Like, you you. The person, not just the tiny human who’d come from nowhere. You don’t have a moment like that, do you? A falling-in-love moment. Children don’t. I didn’t with my mother, god knows I didn’t. It’s just part of you, your love for a parent, until it isn’t. But parents actively fall in love with their children. It happens. There is a moment. You were in your highchair in the kitchen and I was making a coffee. Coffee and sugar kept me going at that point. The radio was on. The Ghostbusters theme tune came on and I started dancing, and you started laughing. I exaggerated the moves, made it all ridiculous and over the top. They way you laughed at that I knew we’d get along. And I knew I loved you. As you. The little individual you were, with your duckling hair and your dirty laugh.’

I look at her hands in her lap. I think of all the times I watched her from the wings. The real times and the remembered times and the imagined times. I say: ‘I think children do have that moment. I think they do.’

If we were more evolved, more mature, more comfortable people, we would embrace or something at this point.

NAKED AMBITION

I’m leaving the Foof office, high on my latest column glory. I walk out of WerkHaus with a spring in my step. I decide to get something nice for dinner, something to take home, a gastropub bistro dish for two. As I walk past Oxford Circus, I see the homeless man I ranted at that time. I stop. He looks at me, expectantly.

‘I’m sorry for ranting at you drunkenly,’ I say.

He looks at me as though he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘of course you don’t remember me. You must have hundreds of people giving you shit every day. Why would you just remember one?’

He narrows his eyes. ‘Wait a minute,’ he says. ‘Were you the one going on about Facebook?’

‘That’s me! That was me!’

It is so good to be remembered, even negatively.

‘Yeah,’ he says.

‘Well, I’m very sorry anyway. I’m a bit better now.’

He says, ‘That’s okay.’ He says, ‘I thought you looked like a person in great pain.’

I nod. ‘You weren’t too far off the mark.’

I can see now how unwell I was. This culture of constant checking, of feeling as though everything can be instantly sorted, and accounted for, and validated, and gratified – that has to rub off on us psychically, doesn’t it? I’ll check, I’ll check, I’ll check. The weather, my thighs, my politics, my lunch. Erasing all mystery. But does it? Does it, really?