I asked if she liked the song they played on the radio. Pushing her a little more, even though The Beatles are one of the buttons that switch her past on right away: ‘Oh, but that’s one of the most mediocre Beatles songs, sweetheart. No, I don’t like it at all. As I’ve said before, we had a portable record player because my dad didn’t let us use his, the one in the living room. I was five or six and I remember that whenever my brothers and sisters put a Beatles record on I’d bounce up and down on the armchairs – I’m talking about 1964, sweetheart – and when my brother turned up the volume I’d take my shoes off, throw the cushions in the air and dance until my mum came in and told us to calm down. I remember my parents talking at the dinner table about those “shaggy-haired” guys who came along to wreak havoc with their “noise”. My father called them Las Beatles instead of Los Beatles, that’s right, with the feminine article, because they had long hair and back then it was very eccentric to have long hair. You can imagine. Anyway, while my dad went on criticising them in the kitchen at home, The Beatles were really taking off. They were played on the radio more and more. I grew up listening to that music. When I was at secondary school, they were in a real hippy phase – this is the start of the seventies I’m talking about, when they recorded that famous album, Bangladesh. It was a really expensive record. Listen, I’ll tell you all about it. One time when I was bunking off school with my friends, we went to a shop called Hip 70 where they sold imported records – oh, Mexico City was completely different in those days, you’d be amazed if you could see La Telaraña, the clothes shop, or boutique, as they were called then, or our official menu of molletes and coffee in the VIPS in Altavista, or the bowling alley we went to, which is a supermarket now, but anyway, that shop stocked the precious record and we hid it in the hippie satchel my friend Hugo brought me back from Oaxaca, the one my mother found so embarrassing. We strolled nonchalantly out of the shop with the record in the satchel. There were six of us, we were in hysterics about having left with the record without anyone realising and we carried on to Hugo’s house to listen to our new acquisition. Yes, sweetheart, we stole it. But “Michelle” and “With a Little Help from My Friends” are my favourite songs because when I started going to parties with my sisters when I was fourteen, fifteen, your only chance of getting anywhere near the boy you liked was if he asked you to dance one of those slow songs “cheek to cheek”. And I thought “Michelle” was such a lovely song at that age. But my teenage years, as you know, were coloured by a lot of fraught moments and confrontations with my parents. We were always at odds; they couldn’t stand so many of the things I liked, you see. It was a different time, sweetheart, all those Catholic exiles struggling to uphold the morals of their large families. They hit me a fair bit and we had plenty of arguments, my mother and I most of all, and on top of that their generation just didn’t understand anything. I remember one afternoon perfectly, how I felt so understood and so loved, singing “With a Little Help from My Friends” with those six friends of mine at the age of sixteen, in my friend Hugo’s living room. So, you see, they pulled that song out of the hat to make money with the name of the group that meant everything to my generation. But it’s nothing like the classics we sang when we were sixteen.’