My dad’s name actually is Larry, which Lou once said could have been half their problem. Because even though she tried really hard for a long time, she could never be as happy as Larry. And he could never understand why.

When I was about five, he invented a piece of software that collated medical data streams two hundred times faster than anything else on the market. It turned out to be a pretty genius idea, and his company gave him a promotion and sent him to their head office in Kyoto. We stayed, and that, folks, was all she wrote.

‘Call me Lou,’ my mother said not long after he left, and when I asked why, she said, ‘So I can remember who I am.’ There’s no way I could have known what she meant, but I must have thought it was important, because I remember lying in bed repeating Lou, Lou, Lou under the covers for a week of nights so I’d remember to stay on brand.

It’s probably a shame I didn’t get more of my father in the gene lottery, because he’s a pretty sweet dude. I like him a lot. Love him, really, although he does remain conspicuous in his absence, as Lou likes to say. But even though he’s ended up half a world away, he’s done his best for me over the past ten years, via a tsunami of paper lanterns, origami cranes and other stuff sent through the post.

When his lovely Japanese replacement wife Meiko came along, the gifts went up a notch and started to include strange-tasting sweets and cute miniature knick-knacks. Once it was a tiny ceramic owl in a cloth-covered box with a paper wish for a thousand lifetimes of happiness. Another time it was a lucky waving golden cat, whose eyes went from side to side when you shook it. On the first day, I shook it so much its eyes jammed left and never moved again, but it continues to wave and wish me luck on demand.

Whenever he comes back to England, which is about once a year but not always, my dad takes me to places like the zoo or the Science Museum or the National Portrait Gallery. Then we drive to Kent to visit his parents, my grandparents, who are very, very nice and seem just as happy as Larry. We drink tea and eat homemade ginger cake and none of us ever mention the fact that we only see each other once a year (but not always), even though they only live a couple of hours away from us. Lou says, even though I should definitely see them, that part of her life is over. But they always ask after her, and Grandma always gives me a slice of cake to take back.

‘Send your mother our love,’ Grandad always says. So I do, and sometimes that goes well and sometimes it doesn’t. One year, ‘That part of my life is over, Wolfie,’ was the last thing Lou said for a week.