Instead of walking down the driveway directly to my shed, I pulled out the key to my parents’ front door and skipped up the steps. There were no lights on inside, my parents were probably asleep already, but I’d left all my old diaries in the loft when I went away and I needed them. The written word was more reliable than memories.

The house was quiet, except for the ticking of the hallway clock and the occasional clack of the boiler in the understairs cupboard. It didn’t matter that it was July, a day did not go by when my mother did not have the heating on. What if the queen was driving past, her car broke down and she wanted a bath and we didn’t have any hot water? It just wouldn’t do. What would the neighbours think?

I was rifling through the post in the hall when I heard a sound coming from the living room.

‘Bugger me, that’s cold.’

Clearly my dad, clearly complaining. Even though all I wanted to do was get my diaries and retreat to my shed with my memories and the enormous bar of chocolate I’d bought at the train station, I couldn’t imagine a version of events where I didn’t get an almighty bollocking for not coming in to say hello before I started creeping around in the loft.

‘Only me,’ I called, as breezy as I could manage, pushing open the living room door. ‘I’m going to pop into the loft and – oh my God.’

My parents were sitting at the dinner table, or, to be more specific, my mum was sitting at the dinner table, a pair of chopsticks in her hand, and my dad was on top of it, his eyes wide open, mouth clamped shut and his naked body covered in sushi.

‘Hello, love,’ Mum said calmly, standing to reveal she was wearing nothing other than a full-length apron featuring a blacksmith’s body on the front, which I remembered Jo bringing back from a school trip to Ironbridge. She leaned across the table and puffed out a candle burning awfully close to a sensitive part of my father’s anatomy, which thankfully had been covered with a napkin.

‘We thought you’d already gone to bed,’ she said, her face fixed in a tense smile.

‘And I thought you’d put the chain on the door,’ Dad muttered through a clenched jaw, not moving so much as a muscle.

Horrified, I was stuck to the spot. Why did this keep happening to me? Why couldn’t I have walked in on something civil, like some nice armed robbers, instead?

‘Are you hungry?’ Mum asked, smiling at me with manic eyes.

‘I don’t think I’ll ever be hungry again,’ I replied. ‘I mean, no. I’m fine, thank you. This is all fine.’

‘You said you’re going into the loft?’