I sit down in front of the TV, pick out my favourite video and slide it into the video recorder. The Great Barrier Reef – ‘a sea-girt wilderness of coral reefs, cays, islands and sheltered seas, forming a one hundred thousand square mile fringe of the eastern Australian mainland’.

Flying to Tower Hamlets

Next Saturday I call to say I’m on my way. He doesn’t pick up.

I don’t notice the drive to his house or the red lights. My siren is blaring. I try to open the door, but the key won’t fit. It’s the wrong key. My hands won’t fit. They’re the wrong hands. Then the key does fit, but it won’t turn. It’s the wrong lock. It’s the wrong door. It’s the wrong house. Then the key turns, but the door won’t budge. So I push against it with my shoulder and it suddenly gives way and I’m thrown inside as if I’ve just crossed the finishing line in a tremendous last-ditch burst of power and agility and my legs are flying behind me trying to catch up. I stumble towards his room, then stop myself.

I take a deep breath and open the door.

He’s on the floor. He’s paralytic on the floor, arms and legs splayed out like a crab’s. For Christ’s sake it’s only bloody eleven in morning. Couldn’t he have waited until the afternoon before passing out? Ever heard of a solid breakfast, Dad? Remember the days when you ate porridge from a saucepan every morning without fail? Not something liquid and fermented?

I bend over him and shake his shoulder. He stirs and mumbles something. Nothing new there. I really struggle to lift him because he’s a dead weight and I’ve never lifted a dead weight off the floor before, so my body is twisting one way and his another as I drag him on to his chair. He’s wet himself, and he’s drooling, and his eyes are swimming, and there’s a bump on his head.

He’s not drunk. Jesus Christ, he’s not drunk!

I dial 999.

Suspected dehydration, they tell me at the hospital. Dehydration, pure and simple. Hydrate him, then, I say, relieved. I don’t think he’s drunk a glass of water for years.

I go home and resume work on my Toshiba laptop, researching Thai government bonds that do not have sufficient history to make investment expectations certain.

The hospital calls me at midnight.

The doctor’s voice is middle aged, middle class, tired, measured, concerned, practised, ever so slightly hesitant, anonymous and unforgettable.

‘Can I speak to Mr Stanley Williams, please?’

‘Speaking.’

‘I am sorry to call you so late …’

The Coroner’s Office