“Anyway, Fairlawns turned out to be the best place in the world for her. Mrs Bellamy runs it like a ship, but she’s a good and kind captain. Lovely caring people up there. Nothing was ever too much trouble. The trouble was, the Tattyvan wasn’t bringing in enough money – I just wasn’t out on the road often enough. That was part of the problem anyway. Couldn’t pay the bills. Clever with engines, hopeless with money, that’s me.

“So with money running short, I had to sell the house – I didn’t like being there without Marion anyway. And that’s when I bought the barge, bought it for a song. Never told her. There was no point. Her memory had gone – sometimes she didn’t even know who I was. It was a funny thing; she talked a lot about Paddywack, asked about him a lot, asked why I never brought him in to see her – and he’d been dead for years, five or six years at least by this time. But he stayed alive in her head right to the end. Maybe she was right after all, maybe old Paddywack didn’t die. He was just resting and now he’s come back as you, if you see what I’m saying. She’d like that. She’d like you.”

Joe parked the van in its usual place under the trees down by the canal, and let Paddywack out. He locked the van, and then patted it affectionately. “Been good to me, this old thing. ‘My brilliant idea’, I called it. Marion said I was mad, ‘off my trolley’, she said, I remember. But she had to laugh when she saw it.”

The van was an old Bedford camper van, about forty years old. Joe had bought it for £150, restored it and done it up as his Tattyvan. He’d found an old Victorian oven in the same scrap yard where he’d discovered the van, and installed it in the back, built a serving counter with an opening hatch at one side and a little kitchen along the other, with a new sink and worktop too, and room for the gas cylinder underneath. But the best thing about it wasn’t the ingenious potato baking technology, but the van itself. Joe had transformed it into one huge baked potato on wheels, with its own headlights and wipers, with its own chimney. He’d made and painted his own sign: “Mr Tattyman, Best baked potatoes in the whole world. Choice of fillings, £3 each.” He’d hook it up on the side of the van whenever he found a pitch, on industrial estates, outside shopping centres and schools, at fêtes and carnivals, but most often outside the hospital because it wasn’t too far from Fairlawns Nursing Home.

It was Marion who had first named it the Tattyvan, and named him Mr Tattyman too. After Marion first went into Fairlawns the business had gone quite well, for a while. Joe could be out in his Tattyvan for most of the day. It had novelty appeal, fun appeal. But the truth was there were never enough customers to make it pay, and Joe didn’t like to put up the price of the potatoes because he thought the children wouldn’t be able to afford them if he did – it was children outside school gates who made up at least half his customers.