Today, week three of community service, Cedar is past the awfulness and planning just to get the job done.

I let him choose the music in the car and he picks Leonard Cohen. We play it loud, with the windows tight and the bleak grey sky reaching down among the mountains again. It’s not winter – there’s no snow in the clouds, but they’re an advance party scouting out our terrain before winter properly arrives.

Much of the summer just gone, Cedar wore a fedora, inside and outside the house. On him it looks cool, as it always did on Leonard Cohen. On me, a fedora makes me look like the guy who just mugged Leonard Cohen and stole his hat. I’m forty-four and my head has yet to work out how hats and ears relate to each other.

I have warped Cedar’s understanding of the world of music. The song we tend to play loudest in the car is Hunters & Collectors’ ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’, both of us singing along at whatever volume we want to. I’ve heard him talk about the song with friends, perplexed that his fellow seven-year-old Alaskans aren’t playing it all the time themselves. He’s heard so much Paul Kelly, and so much about Paul Kelly, that he once described him to a friend as ‘a buddy of Mike’s from Australia’. I have a Spotify playlist based on the Triple J playlist of the early nineties. In Cedar’s world view, the Clouds’ ‘Hieronymus’ is as famous as anything by Beyoncé.

His water bottle taps against my arm.

‘Need water, pls’. He actually says, ‘pls’, vowel-free, as if he’s reading a text message.

‘Okay, we can sort that out later. Not while I’m driving.’ In the mirror, I check that he’s retreated properly back into his seat. ‘You realise there was a time when cars didn’t have cup holders?’

‘Serious?’ He leans across and clunks his bottle back into place. ‘How did you drink?’

‘You didn’t. You waited.’ There are plenty of parking spaces outside the Merc as I turn off the highway onto Hightower Road. ‘In the olden days, you just got thirsty or hungry or bored. You put up with stuff.’

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Well.’ He watches me in the mirror as I drive the van through a puddle and up to the ramp that leads to the main entrance. ‘Unfortunately, I won’t get to hear any more about that now, because I have to do my community service.’

He laughs at the escape he’s making from the drone of a life lesson on the importance of boredom and the opportunities it presents the young mind. A few more metres of road and we both know that’s where I was taking it.