Jax reckons three is the funniest number because the Comic Triple is the first rule of comedy. It’s like when you start with a line, then you repeat it in a different way and then on the third time you hit the audience with a twist in the punch line that’s the exact opposite of what they’re expecting. Which is kind of what Jax did for real, but I don’t really want to think about that.

When Mum and I were packing our bags into the back of the car to leave, Leonard said he had to make a phone call and did we mind. Mum said, of course not, and even though we couldn’t hear what he was saying because he had his back to us and Mum always says it’s not polite to listen to other people’s phone calls, I reckon that he probably would have been talking to his wife Iris.

I’ll tell you something I know for sure, though, which is that Leonard really and truly understands what it’s like to have the Rolls-bloody-Royce of best friends, like me and Jax. Because he told me that’s exactly the way he felt about Iris from the minute he first looked into her big baby blues at the Gresham dance hall on Holloway Road. And he reckons he’s never stopped looking since. It made me think that it must be nice to have someone who still wants to be your friend after sixty-two years, which is how long Leonard and his wife have been married. That’s two times as long as how old Mum is and five times as long as Jax’s whole entire life.

After Leonard finished talking on the phone, when he turned around he looked kind of sad, so I guess he was already missing Iris a bit. But before I could ask him if he was okay Big Al showed up, which was a surprise to me and Mum, but maybe not to Leonard, because someone must have told him where we were staying. When I saw him come around the corner I got butterflies in my tummy straightaway, which reminded me of how I feel when Jax and I are having a really good day. Which was pretty much every day when he was still here.

Big Al said he couldn’t let us leave without saying goodbye and he gave me a book called The Big Book of British Comedy Greats, which I knew he must have bought especially, because it was brand-new. So then I’d had the butterflies feeling and I’d got a great new book. Which you’d think would have made me feel pretty good, but instead it made me feel guilty because I’d forgotten to be sad about Jax again, like I did when I was sorting out the Comedy Pot with Leonard. And this whole trip was supposed to be about remembering Jax, not forgetting him.

Then something funny happened and I definitely don’t mean in a good Comic Triple punch line kind of way. I was standing there trying to say thank you to Big Al for the book, but instead my brain just started thinking about Dan McFartBottom, who didn’t care even if he was my dad. And about his three boys who might or might not be my little brothers but now I’d never know. And about how Leonard and Iris had got to be best friends and married for five times as long as Jax got to even be alive. And I started crying. Like a baby. Not at all like a twelve-year-old almost stand-up comedian. And I couldn’t stop.