When we lived in Clerkenwell, he’d bring Angela and me on the hour-long walk here, sometimes, and he’d point up at the iconic flat above the station and say, ‘One day, I’d like to live there’, like all the promise of the world was in The Palladian, which of course it wasn’t. After the accident, he received a large amount of compensation, and when he heard from Jack Templeton that the flat was up for sale, back in 1982, he bought it, just like that, over the telephone. How sad it was that when he finally got to step inside, he couldn’t see a bloody thing.

‘Come on, then,’ I say, with fake enthusiasm. Dad takes the back of my arm again and we walk away from the station and take the few steps to the edge of the pavement on Haverstock Hill. We have to cross in three sections; there are two islands in the road. I wait for the traffic to pass then I say, ‘Kerb down, Dad,’ and we cross.

‘All right?’ I ask him, as we cross to the first island.

‘Well, I can’t bloody well see anything, but yeah, I suppose so.’

It’s going to be like this, then, is it? I think. Grumpy Bollocks on Tour? We cross to the second island. We must look quite conspicuous – Dad in his baseball cap and me in my coral dream and inadequate face paint. We reach the other side of the road – ‘Kerb up!’ – then begin to carefully walk up Chalk Farm Road, heading for Camden.

Dad taps left right, left right, with his cane. We are ignored or stared at – briefly – or swerved around. Mostly ignored. It was so different when Dad had a guide dog. We always caused a bit of a stir, back then, especially on the school run – Dad rocking up with Sunny, all the school kids fussing round, the mums saying ‘aww’ … Angela revelled in it and I didn’t. She would stand there in her pigtails and her little skirt, looking all proud; I was in the final year and would hate all the attention. Mums would look from dog to Dad to Angela to me; their eyes remaining on my face just a fraction too long before they smiled unsure half-smiles coated in sympathy and just a smidgeon of mild disgust.

‘Careful,’ I say, steering Dad to the left slightly. ‘Lamp-post. Don’t want to fall at the first hurdle.’

‘I don’t want to fall at all,’ snaps Dad, ‘and I refuse to walk into a lamp-post. What sort of cliché would that be?’