I plug back into my headphones and put on the Bonnie Raitt album, Luck of the Draw – an old favourite of mine, except I always avoid ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’, because its lyrics make me cry. I like female singer-songwriters. I like Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell and Dolly Parton and Sheryl Crow. I like Carole King and Carly Simon. I like strong women with something to say because I am not a strong woman and I have nothing to say. I don’t always agree with all their lyrics, though. ‘Jolene’ could have had him, for example, and good riddance … If he’s that vain, it really isn’t going to help that this song definitely is about him … I’m also sad for how someone like Janis Joplin lived and died, but when she rasps her way through ‘Summertime’, I am utterly transported.

I take my phone from my bag as I listen and have a nose on Facebook – Angela has a new bag and went to the cinema with it last night. Some idiot I knew at school has had another baby and named it after a shampoo. I go on the Daily Mail online, the Sidebar of Shame: their showbiz gossip. I look at their news column. Then I go on to Safari and search ‘News, Warren Street tube station’, and it comes up straight away: ‘Incident on the line, suspected jumper’:

British Transport Police were called to Warren Street underground station this afternoon. At least 10 emergency services vehicles were seen outside the station and the Northern Line was suspended for three hours. Sadly, a woman was pronounced dead at the scene.

How awful, I think. It makes me feel funny – a feeling of vertigo, almost, or that I am as lightweight as that balloon, floating to nowhere. Although I saw nothing, I was so close to where it happened, mere feet from where this woman lost her life. I wonder how old she was, if she had children. How bad her life was that she wanted to bring it to an end. I remember the card I was given by the well-meaning London Underground woman. Did I look bad? Just being me? So bad she deduced I must have seen something?

I mooch around the internet some more, gaze at lovely tropical holidays I’ll never go on, then head on to Twitter, where I follow a handful of achieving, purposeful blind people, to get ideas for Dad to reject. Then I read a new article about Billie Holiday.

Dad comes out of the kitchen and plonks two steaming plates of carbonara on the little round table between our chairs.