Krista’s letter had arrived in an elastic-banded bundle. It was on the day I’d been looking out for Dewi-post to give him his Christmas box. Because my parents were coming to us for the holiday I’d taken a couple of days off work to clean the house (my mother is such a fastidious woman). I’d watched Dewi trudge up the lane through the sludge of the previous day’s snow. He looked perished so I asked him in for a coffee or something – like you do at Christmas. He only stayed long enough to gulp down his tea: although he was curious enough about us, he was clearly uncomfortable to be alone in the house with me.

I must have read Krista’s letter half a dozen times. The fact that she’d deteriorated so quickly left me wondering if she’d skipped a year and the news of her daughter’s coming out was already two years old. I hadn’t known that diabetes could knacker your kidneys. The dialysis sounded awful and the wait for a kidney even more wearing. They’d been down the route of looking to her immediate family to see if one of them could donate. Phil, her husband, had high blood pressure and Hannah, like her mother, was diabetic. There was a brother who’d joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses, so he hadn’t even been asked to consider a blood test. So she was on a waiting list. She sometimes found herself daydreaming, especially around Bank Holidays and Christmas, that some wonderfully fit and healthy person would be fatally injured on the road so that she might regain her life. Waking from such daydreams, she’d come out in a cold sweat realising what a nightmare she was wishing on some anonymous family.

Throughout that day as I hoovered and dusted, made up the spare bed (I even ironed the sheets and pillowcases), bleached the loo and zapped the black scummy mould in the shower with stuff from one of those spray guns, I thought about Krista. We’d had a lot of fun together, and a lot of heartache too… half a lifetime ago.