‘Anyway, come on. Enough of this. We’ve got a game to finish.’ She points down at my dog counter, which is sitting on Pentonville Road. ‘And don’t think all this crying is getting you out of that.’ She holds her hand out, grinning. ‘You owe me rent, young man.’

The Monopoly game grinds to a halt pretty quickly after that. I find I can’t concentrate on my fictional property portfolio when I know that my time with Mum is slipping away, second by precious second.

So instead, I put on two more of our long-distance car tapes, and spend the next three hours asking her all the things I’ve never thought to ask before. I hear about her childhood, her school days, university. Her early twenties, when she worked on a kibbutz in Israel. All this crazy stuff I never knew. She even tells me about the night she met my dad. It was at the opening of an N. F. Simpson play at the Royal Court. Their interval drinks orders got mixed up, they got talking, and the rest was history.

‘What’s got into you this evening?’ she chuckles at one point. ‘You’ve never showed the slightest bit of interest in my life before, and now you’ve turned into Michael bloody Parkinson.’

It’s meant as a joke – I think – but the truth of it stings me to my core. I never did show any interest. I was completely self-absorbed. I just thought of her as Mum, rather than a real person with hopes and fears, who’d had adventures and made mistakes.

Finally – after a lot more laughing and drinking and story-telling, all soundtracked by our excellent folk/hip hop compilation albums – we pack the Monopoly set away and slump in front of the TV.

The closing moments of some Seventies James Bond film flicker before us, and despite everything, I feel exhaustion bite right into me. The emotional whirlwind of the last few hours – not to mention the copious red wine – is beginning to take effect.

I glance over at Mum as she watches Roger Moore prancing about on the screen, and feel so full of love for her. I don’t want this moment to end.

But it will. The clock above the telly reads ten to midnight. Which means I have exactly nine minutes before all this evaporates and I find myself in another place, at another time.

I know I should be grateful that I got even one more day with Mum, but I can’t help it: I want more.

I sit up straight and take a deep breath. There must be a way to make it happen. There has to be some kind of loophole. The watch-seller told me I’d jump again at one minute to midnight – but when it happened last night, I was asleep. Maybe the jumps can only happen when I’m asleep?