We’d driven three times to the Surrey Hills, exploring different parts which were much the same. Villages with Norman churches, ancient half-timbered pubs with horseshoes on the walls, a smell of damp tweed and overpriced beer that my father would drink a pint of anyway, while my mother had a Babycham. We’d eaten lunch by then, a picnic each time, since we owned the basket. Always in a field, because that was an English experience. Two times out of three, Michael had stepped in a poo, and our father had to sit there like a cobbler with the fouled shoe between his knees, swearing and scraping the poo off with a stick before giving the sole a vigorous rub on the reliably damp grass. Our most recent picnic was under a sycamore tree, and we threw the seeds up into the air, Michael chasing them and clapping at them as they helicoptered back to Earth. My mother took photos of that, several of them, until my father said we probably didn’t need a whole roll.

Today would have been another of those picnics – the morning had been overcast, but brighter, and we would no doubt have set off in weather like that – but my father was away, on a management weekend with Rupert and senior staff. Mr Murdoch. He was always Rupert when my father spoke about him, but I had to remember he was Mr Murdoch if I ever met him. My father was part of the team brought in to ‘totally Murdoch’ the News of the World and The Sun. That’s how he put it to me. ‘Murdoch the arse off them’ was how I’d heard him describe it to his friends before we left Brisbane. Murdoch had a style, I knew that. A particular way of running papers. My father was on the business side, though I met the editor of one of the papers, Mr Shrimsley, a few days after we arrived, when we were still in the hotel. I hadn’t seen him since. He hadn’t yet made it out to Teddington.

The bus passed an empty building site with ‘Fuck the Sex Pistols’ graffitied on the newly exposed wall of the next shop in black spray paint. Malcolm McLaren’s work, more than likely. Anything to keep people talking.

A couple of bus trips ago, I’d noticed ‘Snuff Rock’ scrawled on a wall on our way home. Was snuff rock real? A stage act where the audience slouched in and waited for your shitty punk-playing to end and you to top yourself? Sid would do that. Others might too. London. Welcome to London.