After that I dropped in to see Beryl, for a chat and a cup of tea. I had one more call to make that day. It was on my way home, a town house in Tufnell Park, and I’d more or less guessed what it was before I got there. You’d be surprised how many householders can’t mend a fuse. And not only can’t mend it but don’t even know it needs mending and that that’s what the trouble is. I charge £40 as a minimum for any call-out and it does puzzle me how anyone would rather pay that amount of money for a job that takes five minutes than get someone like me to show them how to perform this simple operation. That would cost them £40 too but at least it would be a one-off. I’ve tried, I’ve offered, but they either refuse point-blank or ask me why I think they’ve sent for me. One woman even said she wouldn’t keep a dog and bark herself.

I was ignorant about electricity myself once, criminally ignorant, you might say, and it cost me dear, me and Daniel, especially Daniel. If I’m out of my glass house now and can therefore throw stones, I’ll never forget being inside it, I’ll never forget messing with the mystery and the way it struck back.

Tufnell Park to home on North Hill took me ten minutes. It’d be less than five when the traffic is light. The block I live in is eleven stories high and so far, unlike in Beryl’s tower on the Harrow Road, the lift has always been in working order. My flats are called Cityscape Court but you can see far more than the city from my roof garden: the river like a silver string, Greenwich and the Observatory and the green hills beyond, a segment of the Millennium Dome if you know where to look for it, a hundred church spires and towers, the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre, and on this side the Palace of Westminster with the sun shining on its bright pinnacles and the face of Big Ben. I did what I always do at this hour, if I’m home in good time, that is, and if it’s warm enough: take my drink out onto the roof garden, sit in one of my very comfortable loungers at my cane and glass table, and gaze and gaze at the great panorama that lies below and around me. Earth hath not anything to show more fair, as the only poem I ever remember learning at school puts it. But no, not the only one, there was another, and that too is part of this story that I’m writing. Having kept a diary as I went along, not every day or even every week but just from time to time, is going to help me do that.