After they headed off to school and work, I plotted up with a second coffee on the patio in the saggy old armchair I’d rescued from Ray’s hard rubbish for a bit of me time. Even in winter (starting hours at whatever job I was at permitting), I rarely deviated from my morning ritual. Because at the risk of sounding as woo-woo as Dr Spooner, that half an hour sitting in the fresh air, deliberately doing nothing, set me up for the rest of the day. Even if the plan for the rest of the day was doing nothing.

When I was a kid, my father swore by a version of that very ritual. While the rest of us got ourselves dressed, ate breakfast and shouted at the telly, he’d head to his 1930s French leather club chair with his cup of tea. He’d sit in it for exactly half an hour – no more, no less – staring out at the big bay laurel tree in our front garden and looking for all the world like the happiest man on the planet. Between his job and his family, every other waking minute of his day belonged to someone else, but that half-hour was all his.

I think it might be the one good habit I’ve cultivated over a lifetime of accumulating bad ones, and to me, the fact that I continued to show up for my regular coffee-making duties was solid proof that I actually didn’t have a ‘fucking raging case of commitment issues’. (Ah, lovely, sparky, foul-mouthed Hannah, if only you’d had the time and constitution to stick around.) But there’s also a small and wishful part of me that hoped the provision of good coffee might go some way to excusing the bad behaviour I’d engaged in while I’d been Dom’s house guest, when it came to losing keys, climbing over neighbours’ fences at three in the morning, and occasionally shouting the bar with my rent money.

With Lou and Wolfie in the house, the vibe in the mornings was decidedly different, though. For the first two days I was so focused on avoiding an encounter with them that the froth on the coffee was particularly long and the banter unusually short. Dom and George seemed oblivious on both counts, so I managed to slip out and get back over to the shed (forgoing my lovely armchair) before anyone else appeared.

On both days, I’d left via the side gate soon after I heard the garage roller door open and close, staying out until I knew Dom would be back from the afternoon school run (one of the perks of being in demand and able to work his own hours). In those forty-eight hours, I’d seen three films, walked the perimeters of two Royal Parks – twice – and drunk about thirty cups of tea in various cafes around North London. My shameful plan worked quite well, with the exception of the second day, when I’d forgotten about George’s three-thirty swimming lesson and had to circle the block four times until I saw Dom’s car finally pull up in the driveway forty-five minutes later.