I’m wearing a beautiful boho dress I bought from Loved Before last winter – another item acquired in a fit of imagining a lifestyle I don’t and won’t ever have and a dress I admired long before I felt brave enough to wear it. It’s maxi length with an off-the-shoulder neckline – floral print. It’s probably too young for me, but there you go. I look OK in it, if you squint your eyes quite tight and ignore the birthmark squatting above the dress, like a demon. If you don’t squint, I probably look like a blemished Nana Mouskouri – and if you remember her then you’re as old as me and there’s no hope for either of us.

Dad and I are off to Covent Garden. The escalator at Chalk Farm is out of order so we take the stairs.

‘Thirty-four spiral steps then a turning platform then twenty more flat ones,’ says Dad and he counts them as we descend, his cane tap-tapping and his hand on the railing.

‘How do you remember all this stuff?’ I ask him.

‘I just do,’ he replies.

On the platform, the air that whooshes up the tunnel is hot and dry. As we walk to an empty space in order to wait for the train, Dad takes in a long deep breath of it, like he is actually relishing the thick, underground pollution filling his lungs. He seems cheery this morning. He wasn’t scared on the threshold, before we came out. He seemed raring to go. Perhaps he is buoyed by our trip to St Dunstan in the East. Perhaps he is just getting used to being out in the world again.

‘Eight stops to Covent Garden,’ he says, ‘changing at Leicester Square.’

The next place on the list. One of the busiest places in London. Even on a Monday. The tube we squeeze on to is sardined and crazy hot. Covent Garden tube station is absolutely packed. When we arrive, there’re a million people choking the cramped barrier area: tourists; families with multitudes of swerving, meandering kids; people waiting for people or saying goodbye; gaggles of teenagers with bags over their shoulders, shouting at each other as they all have headphones on; a blind man and his daughter, just trying to make our way through them all, without injury, and out on to the street.

We turn right out of the station and head down to Covent Garden. James Street is also swarming with excited pedestrians and punctuated with those human statues: metallic frozen centurions and rigid Victorian ladies with parasols; a static, silver ballet dancer with fierce calves, sitting on a stool; a motionless Laurel and Hardy, in bronze. Each has a circle of gaping people around them, staring and staring, willing the spray-painted bodies to move and trying to get them to blink.

‘The same as ever?’ asks Dad as we walk down the street.

‘Pretty much.’