‘Including me?’ I asked, foolishly fishing for something positive after our recent rapprochement.

‘Particularly you. I always have to be someone else with you,’ said my daughter, instantly shutting the door to future intimacies. ‘Anyway, I must get to bed. Got an early meeting in the morning.’

She moved brusquely round the room, clearly wanting me out of it so she could pull out the sofa bed.

‘Yes, I’ve got quite a day tomorrow,’ I said. Which was possibly an understatement.

Jools didn’t ask what the day ahead held for me. She didn’t talk about anything other than practical details of where I’d find towels and so on. She seemed ashamed of having let her guard slip. Maybe she did know how much it had meant to me, but she made no further reference to her lapse.

And there was no hug or kiss as we went to our separate bedrooms.

It took me a long time to go to sleep. Partly perhaps the unfamiliar bed, Herne Hill’s different traffic noises from those of Chichester.

Also, I kept thinking about the tiny glimmer of hope that had been opened up in my relationship with my daughter. I knew I mustn’t overinflate it – her reversion to the standoffish Jools at the end of the evening told me that – but at least, very briefly, it had been proved that we could communicate.

But probably the biggest factor in my sleeplessness was the prospect of the next day’s confrontation.

As is so often the annoying case with a bad night, I ended up oversleeping my usual waking time. When I got up, there was no sign of Jools. A note on the kitchen table reading: ‘See ya’. Just that.

I didn’t feel hungry, so all I had by way of breakfast was a flat white, made in Jools’s very swish Italian coffee-maker. Again, I found myself wondering about her sources of income. She certainly seemed able to live in some style.

I thought I’d better get out as soon as possible. The Yeti had ended up in a marked parking space the night before, but it might be in danger of an early morning ticket from some assiduous traffic warden.

Before I left, though, I paused outside Jools’s spare-room door.

She hadn’t said I wasn’t to go in. And, having provided the deposit for the flat, I did feel some kind of proprietorial rights in the place. The door wasn’t locked. I opened it.

The room was absolutely full of clothes. Hanging from wheeled racks. All new clothes, maybe worn once, undoubtedly freebies Jools had accumulated from all her fashion launches.

And none of them built to last. They reminded me again of that statistic about how 300,000 tonnes of garments are burnt or buried in the UK every year.

Why they were there, I could not imagine. Did my daughter make extra cash from selling them? Did she think she’d wear them all again at some point? Or was she curating an archive of instant fashion to be gazed at in disbelief by future generations? Hanging in her spare room, at least they weren’t being burnt or buried. That was a small comfort.