“Instead of the bits of the bus doing their things ‘all day long’ they do them ‘all through the town,’” she explained.

For a moment, that helped because while we couldn’t agree on what to talk about, what to sing, or if singing was even a good idea, we were completely agreed that putting the words all through the town in the wheels-on-the-bus song was absolute fucking blasphemy.

“How do you know so much about it?” enquired Barbara Clench in a moment of rare humanity.

Ana with one n craned her neck back to look at the rest of us. “I used to be a primary school teacher.”

“Used to be?” Coming from Barbara Clench, that question had a not-going-to-end-well quality.

“Yeah, now I take my clothes off on the internet.”

For a woman who, by the looks of her husband, had a full and active sex life, Barbara Clench could be difficult about this kind of thing. Her lips got very thin. “Don’t you find that rather degrading?”

“Sort of,” Ana with one n admitted. “I mean when you think about it, there’s something pretty degrading about the fact that I went to university, did two degrees and a professional qualification, spent three years working seventy-hour weeks with disadvantaged children, and at the end had nothing to show for it but crushing debts and a few nice thank-you cards.” She took a deep breath. It sounded like she did this rant a lot. “So I decided that if the choice was getting wanked over by strangers or fucked over by the Department for Education, I’d pick the one that paid better.”

There was complete silence in the bus while Barbara radiated the kind of stifling disapproval that you could radiate only after a lifetime of never bothering to examine a single preconception. A silence that persisted until Oliver, in his best peacemaker’s voice, said, “What if we try ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ instead?”

Two hours into a four-hour journey we stopped at a service station so that Rhys could have, in his own words “a slash and a sarnie.” I took the opportunity to stretch my legs and grabbed one of the family-sized bags of Skittles that they were, for some unfathomable reason, selling at a discount in W.H. Smith. Once we’d taken our welcome break at the Welcome Break, we piled back into the minibus for the second and, as it turned out, more complicated part of the journey.

Coombecamden, the technically-a-city-because-it-had-a-cathedral-even-though-it-was-actually-tiny of which Miffy’s father was apparently Earl, was situated a little way south of Liverpool, right by the Welsh border, but Rhys’s mate’s house was a little way west of that and a fair distance into the countryside. Which meant that we spent the next very long time on narrow, windy roads occasionally blocked by sheep, trying to navigate by a bickering consensus of low-resolution satnav, poorly understood maps, and guesswork.