She asked me the other day: ‘What would you do if I died first?’ and I told her that I’d make a shrine to her just above the recycling bin, so I’d remember her every time I chucked out an empty bottle. The truth is I can’t imagine what it would be like dragging on through the long days without her. Our friends – showily lamenting their silver hairs and solidifying paunches, glancing at us to see if we agree with them too easily – are realising that mortality is not quite as distant as it used to be. It never felt too far away from me anyway, always shadowing my family like a hungry dog, casting me sneaky looks.

Raymond is grown up, in his twenties and taller than me. He’s chopped his name permanently down to Ray to travel lighter. He’s got a degree in economics, a room in a shared flat, and a good-looking brunette girlfriend with an eyebrow piercing and a tattoo of a star on her shoulder, who laughs a bit too eagerly at all his jokes. When he gives me a hug I can feel the wiry energy in his arms.

They have new rules for each other now, his generation, ones that I don’t really get. When I was growing up, sleeping with a girl was still a bit like grocery shopping in the old Soviet economy: there was more demand than supply. You had to do a stint in the breadline, but while you were shivering there at least you had a little time to dream. I’m romanticising it of course. I wasn’t exactly a strolling troubadour. I wasn’t even very nice, because the only one I could be bothered with was Eve.

There was more longing to it than this lot has, though. Now they go browsing in a hypermarket of infinite choice, ordering each other up on their smartphones like pizzas, tap-tapping with their little apps and Tinders, hooking up and hanging out and getting bored and drifting apart and swiping right again. They don’t even take the time to dislike each other properly.

Still, who cares? Every generation messes things up in its own way. I loved Raymond, and still do, with the steadiness of an older brother. He turned me into an adult. Through those early years I woke him up on the dark winter mornings when getting him out of his warm bed was like tugging a wincing snail out of its shell. I walked him to school when Eve couldn’t, listening as his harmless gossip about his classmates puffed out along with his breath in the cold air. When he was lying sick in bed with a temperature I brought him hot-water bottles and tea.