I should be going straight home as well, but the night is young and after a week of diagonal rain, posting disintegrating envelopes through the doors of the great and good it seems a bloody shame to waste an evening like this. So I walk in the other direction. Past the butcher’s, the baker’s, the café on the bridge that’ll be serving bacon butties in the morning – right about the time we’ll be driving over the River Dee.

I walk across the road into the park. A Willy Nelson track I can’t quite shake. She loves him in spite of his ways that she don’t understand. Fast picking guitars. Harmonica used as another kind of percussion. Walking to the beat down the avenue of limes. I can’t believe how empty it is. The patterns of sun and shadow like my own special lighting. Sing it under my breath even though I can never quite get his accent. Throw my jacket over one shoulder and strut on the gravel like a catwalk model or a cocky American cop. No bloody excuse for it, except I’m a little bit pissed and there’s no one around to tell me to stop being such a tit.

Everything feels like enough. The week’s holiday stretching ahead. And no getting up for church on the Sunday. No arse-numbing sermon to dream through. Then sings my soul. Worshipping at the shrine of the full English breakfast before braving the jellyfish in Llandudno Bay. Blowing up the dinghy with the foot pump – taking Karen out as deep as she dares and then a bit further. Pretending I can’t hear May shouting at us to be careful. Squinting back at the shore and taking it in. The people turning pink. The Great Orme. All those grand bed and breakfasts, painted in deck-chair colours, facing out to sea.

Somewhere in the distance there are girls screaming. Kids in the field throwing sticks and swearing at each other. The shouts of teenage boys. I stop and lean against the mulberry tree. The sound of the stream trickling. On Llandudno pier you can see the waves frothing in the gaps between the wooden slats. Karen used to be scared looking down, as though she’d be sucked through by the sheer force of the water. Once I picked her up and pretended I was going to chuck her over the side and she screamed and May slapped me on the arm and told me to stop tormenting her. That same year I let go of her hand in the arcade and she was lost for five, ten, fifteen minutes, hiding behind a fruit machine, finally popping out and shouting ‘Boo!’ – thrilled by the look on our faces. May called me a bloody careless idiot, and I told her I am, I know I am, I always bloody have been.