When we stepped out on to the pavement, I caught sight of the graffiti in all its glory, and felt a jab of guilt that I hadn’t kept up my side of the deal with Officer Hanley. I gave Gentleman time to have a decent sniff around while I stood looking down at the words, and had another go at remembering what had compelled a very drunk man to write something so potentially deep and meaningful that people had assumed the man himself must have considerable depth and meaning.

I’d been having a few more disjointed flashbacks to the events of that night, so while I was now fairly confident that I was in fact responsible for it (not that there had ever really been any serious doubt), how I’d been able to spout such considered words of wisdom – and, more to the point, why – was still a mystery.

I scuffed the big curly C with my foot, and a hazy memory of standing back to admire my creativity and falling over wafted past. That would at least explain how the al fresco sleeping situation that night had come about, so it was a start, at least.

I ambled through the streets of Belsize Park with my dog and my unusually clear head, nodding to early-morning joggers, strolling past houses that looked entirely unfamiliar, and discovering a tree-lined street straight out of a Richard Curtis movie that I’d never noticed before. By the time we headed for home an hour later, my cheeks were tingling, my chest was open, and I was sucking in generous breaths of gentrified air like I owned it. Gentleman was slightly less enthusiastic, but I got the feeling he’d enjoyed himself, even if he didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of admitting it.

When we turned the corner to Glenmore Road, for a split second I wondered if I was a bit too high on that morning air, unaccustomed as I was to it. I stopped dead in my tracks, which made Gentleman run up the back of my legs and let out a small, annoyed ruff. But then he saw it, too. There, on Ray’s verge, which had most definitely been manicured and empty when we’d left, was my armchair. If that cheeky old bugger hadn’t gone and done a dawn raid out of spite.

In my head I was already banging on Ray’s door demanding an explanation, possibly followed by, Most people thought I was quite funny, you know. But when I got closer, I realised that even though it looked almost identical, it was actually a different chair. Mine (as I felt justified to call it now) had a long tear down the centre of the back, like someone had slashed it open looking for something. (I’d actually wondered more than once if Ray, the sly old fox, was happily living his life off the spoils of the Great Train Robbery.) This chair didn’t have the slash, but it did have an interesting-looking stain on the arm, which could equally have been Cadbury Fruit & Nut or O-positive. Either way, the thought of owning a pigeon pair was too tempting, and also, I’ve got to say, any opportunity to wind Ray up is genuinely impossible for me to resist. I’ll never be that good a man.