I asked around. My old friends Chaz and Sasha suggested Mr Patel in Potters Bar. ‘We’ve had him for years. It’s a bit of a faff to get there but, orthodontically speaking, he’s the dog’s bollocks. And he makes sure it never hurts, not even a root canal. And he’s got lovely breath.’

It was February before I could get an appointment. I went by train because my car wouldn’t start. One by one, as I said, things were breaking down. Nowadays my DAB radio was filled with static, its voices bubbling from somewhere underwater. A brief power-cut had set digital lights pulsing all over the house. The Velux window was leaking. My printer was jammed. And that’s not mentioning the dust. Nobody had set foot in my house for months and it gave me a shock, one day, to notice it with a stranger’s eye.

On the train I watched a small boy eat a chocolate coin. He had the usual trouble peeling the edges off with his fingernails; the carriage was warm and the chocolate was already melting. His mother tried to help but he snatched it away. At Christmas I’d always put a bag of chocolate coins in my children’s stockings. ‘It’ll rot their teeth,’ Greg had said. Later they’d graduated to pillowcases, which Greg said was over-indulgent. ‘It’s turned into an orgy of greed and consumerism,’ he’d said. At times I could hit him. ‘You’re just like my father,’ I’d said. ‘Suffocating the joy out of everything.’ Why were women so much more fun?

This had been my second Christmas without Greg, and the first without Azra. She’d always joined us, sometimes in the company of other waifs and strays. That’s what Greg called them, waifs and strays. Now, on this cruellest day of the year, I’d joined their ranks.

I’d presumed I’d be on my own, hiding from Pam. My daughter was spending it with her new partner’s family in Reykjavik and Max had gone camping in Arizona with someone I suspected, and hoped, might be a boyfriend. I’d always thought my son might be gay. I longed for him to be gay. I longed for him to be happy, and thus slightly less strange.

However, the week before Christmas I got a phone call from my cousin in Catford, inviting me over. Dorothy was a lay preacher and we had nothing in common, but she had a large number of children and grandchildren, some of whom I’d never met, and I thought I could blend into the crowd.