But actually, my dad really did look like he was catching a snooze, not at all like his lovely massive old ticker had just given up the ghost with no warning. I know that because Glenda took a photograph of him after she’d tiptoed around, dusting as quietly as she could for half an hour before realising that something was up. She told me that when her own mother had died, because she lived in Sunderland, the first time she’d seen her in six months was lying in a coffin wearing cinnamon-coloured lipstick. She looked so unlike herself (a stickler for coral shades, apparently) that Glenda had always regretted missing her chance for one last look at her ‘real’ mum.

And so, to honour this good and kind man (‘such manners, you’d think I was the queen, not the cleaner’) in the only way she could, she made us a memory while he still looked like himself. When she handed it to me uncertainly, I remember staring at that photo and thinking it might have been possible to fall in love with Glenda if I’d been born about forty years earlier. Or even right then.

I really hope Dad did shuffle off this old mortal coil thinking he was just closing his eyes for a nod before starting on his banana cake, but there’s always been a part of me that thinks he might just have got sick of waiting for me to clean the gutters in his bungalow, after a full year of asking. Fair play, Dad, you finally got my attention. Nobody could work out why, the day after he died, I was up on the roof with an old straw broom and a plastic scoop when it was a rented house and we were going to have to hand the keys back anyhow. It took me an hour to clean them and another three down at the pub getting drunk when I realised how easy it would have been to make my father happy.

It wasn’t entirely unexpected, though, losing a second parent. Not like the first time. Being twenty-five years older than Mum, it had probably never crossed my dad’s mind that she’d go first and leave him with a couple of kids to raise, but he did a mighty job with what he had. And I see that now. As soon as my mother died, I’d got busy hanging out with the wrong people, discovering girls, drinking and styling my hair to perfection, but I always came home to Dad’s cups of tea and sympathy. He seemed quite perplexed by it all really, particularly the hair, but he got on with feeding and clothing me and being there to pick up the considerable pieces, when needed.

Lou, though. The determination with which she tried to carry on like things were the same was impressive. She still followed me around with a dogged stubbornness, trying to make me notice her, but she hung back slightly – knowing somehow that something had changed. I’d changed. Her neediness, which used to make me feel quite proud, just made me angry and, even though I disguised it well, my behaviour went far beyond that of a teenage kid trying to shake off his annoying little sister.