But I hadn’t asked, so now I had to go with my gut feeling; that Wolfie knew as much about that situation as anyone else on the planet, apart from my sister and me. Which was extremely very little, as George would say.

I’ve lost my sister twice. Both times have been through the carelessness of age, but the things you couldn’t care less about when you’re nine are very different from the things you don’t give a shit about when you’re twenty-three. And so are the consequences.

The first time I lost Lou was because instead of keeping my mind on the job I’d been given – namely looking after my favourite and only sister for half an hour while my mother had a little lie-down – my nine-year-old arse was hanging out of a stormwater drain trying to retrieve my most prized possession, hurled there in a fit of anger by my soon-to-be-ex-best friend, Joe Fletcher.

There were, of course, extenuating circumstances around Joe’s actions, involving two weeks of simmering tension, a ten-year-old femme fatale called Katie, and a clumsily executed kiss in Joe’s parents’ downstairs loo. But to my mind, the significance and quality of that brief encounter nowhere near justified the cost of a cricket ball signed by the great Phil Tufnell himself. Thirty years later, that’s still a hill I’d be delighted to die on.

Keen to help in the search and rescue mission, Lou decided that keeping a tight grip on the back of my legs and shouting very loud encouragement was the best use of her talents. Although she also served up a few choice words to Joe Fletcher, after which I have to say, as a big brother, I’d never been prouder. But faced with the prospect of having seen the last of my priceless cricket ball, my fuse was down to the quick, so I yelled at her to bloody let go of me and get lost.

When I eventually peeled myself off the road, ball-less and stretched almost to the dislocation of both shoulders and a groin muscle, she was gone. She was fast, even for a four-year-old, and if Joe Fletcher had seen which way she went, he wasn’t telling. So that, by the way, was where the friendship ended once and for all.

For the next ten minutes, as I busted my actual balls searching frantically behind hedges, under cars, up trees and, don’t ask me why, in a postbox (nose to the slot like she might have slipped in there for a look), I felt something I’d never before encountered in my vast life experience. The heart-stopping realisation of the sheer number of bad things that could have happened to my little sister just because I’d looked away for a couple of minutes. All of them running up each other’s rears, furiously eating each other and spitting themselves out like some kind of terrifying bad-thing Pac-Man pile-up in my head. Afterwards, I remember thinking that was the day I grew up and became, if not quite a man, at least something more than a nine-year-old boy.