It was always there, at the Hacienda – a sense that I couldn’t quite relax. I had a nice house, a garden, all the sunshine I could want, daily companions in Celestina and her children and a body beginning to heal itself and which I was looking after with regular helpings of green vegetables and fresh fruit smoothies.

But there was a growing sense that bad times were never far away. That something terrifying could happen at any moment.

It may also have been my hormones.

And herein layeth the problem – because where there be hormones, there be’eth Rhiannon. Always there, under the surface, watching, waiting, for anyone to piss her off. It didn’t matter how much surgery I had on the outside, on the inside, I was much the same. And men like Paco brought out the worst in me.

Take the night when I was minding my own business watching TV in the living room. Tenoch was on a call in his office and I’d been sitting there icing my homemade cookies on a lap tray watching an episode of Ramsay’s Hotel Hell – the one with the ghost, Gordon’s apple pie recipe and bedsheets covered in spunk – when they came in, Paco and the Chipmunks. He took the remote off my arm rest and chucked it to Arturo who stole two cookies and slumped on the sofa, switching over to The Santa Clause on Sky Christmas.

To be honest, any break from overpaid basketballers high-fiving piss-easy goals or snarky barbs from grey-haired Miami divorcees was welcome. Problem was, they didn’t shut up the entire film.

‘His ex-wife a tasty piece of ass. Why they divorce?’ said Ming, stealing three of my cookies and making a triple-decker sandwich from them before posting it in his mouth whole.

‘Here we fucking go,’ I muttered.

‘Why his kid not want to spend Christmas with his mom?’ asked Stuzzy, scratching his junk, already on his fifth cookie. ‘He not like Judge Reinhold?’

‘Oh, he was the guy in Beverley Hills Chihuahua, yeah? He funny,’ said Ming, who always sat on the floor for some reason.

Paco took Tenoch’s armchair, aka The Throne. ‘So he not the real Santa Claus, he a toy salesman, right?’

‘Where did that fuckin’ ladder appear from?’ said Paco.

‘There no way you could get a full-grown man down that chimney. And what about the houses that don’t have chimneys? How does he get around all the houses of the world in one night?’

Stuzzy googled the number of houses in the world on his phone. ‘It not possible. It not possible.’

By this point steam was emitting from my ears. ‘OK it’s not possible, you win. This film is a farce.’

‘Why he grow a beard? And get fat?’ said Ming.