‘Black tea would be great thanks, Mr Mulberry. Just the way I take it.’

Well, that was definitely a lie. If I were to judge Pete by his cover, his hot drink of choice was more likely to be Colombian single origin with a side of organic wheatgrass, but it was decent of him to be so polite.

‘Listen, call me Danny, mate. If I’m calling you Pete, I think it’s only fair. It is OK to call you Pete, I take it?’

‘Oh yeah, yeah, of course. Thanks, Danny.’ I could see he was trying to look like he wasn’t having a good old nosey around the shed, but he was a journo and he definitely was. He was also probably trying to work out where I came in on the nut-o-meter. I could have saved him the trouble and just told him; fairly close to the top end some days, mate. Because I’m not that far gone in my love affair with the shed to see how it would look to a stranger. The damp marks creeping down the walls (or up, I could never figure it out); the odd weed popping its head through the cracks in the slab; the peculiar fusty smell, which I knew in my heart of hearts was still there, even though I couldn’t smell it after a year of acclimatising. And that’s before we even got to the extremely very blue (George’s brilliantly accurate description) Buzz Lightyear duvet cover, magnanimously handed down to me when George had added a couple of new ones to his rotation, which featured even brighter colours and some brand-new adventures.

I actually bloody loved that duvet cover. I sometimes imagined that in a parallel universe Buzz and I could have been brothers. I’d be the younger, black sheep of the family, of course, doomed to stay at home to look after the pets and pick up the mail while golden boy zoomed off to infinity and beyond.

‘What is it I can do for you then, Pete?’ I handed him a mug of tea, hoping he wouldn’t notice the congealed drip of whatever was on the outside.

‘Well, Mr . . . sorry, Danny. It’s about the story I wrote. Like my editor says, you can never predict which way the punters are going to go, but turns out we’ve had quite an unexpected response to it.’

You and me both, mate.

‘A positive response, I mean,’ he added quickly. His eyes flicked around the shed again and landed on Buzz. ‘Would it be OK if I . . .?’ He gestured to the bed and I realised how dangerously close his head was to the rafters. I waved my hand invitingly like I was offering him a Terence Conran recliner then quickly ducked behind him to whip the duvet up over the pillow, so he didn’t land in my sleepy hole. He perched on the edge and actually looked surprisingly comfortable.

‘A positive response to what, Pete? Me defacing the pavement? Getting arrested? Giving dear old Ray the two fingers up?’