The Bull’s Head sits safely above, and a road width back from, an artificial embankment on the south side of the river. Just around the corner from where Holst composed The Planets – I know this because there’s a blue plaque on the house and Bev once made me wait half an hour while she checked on some nearby trolls.

The pub itself is an early Victorian mansion with French windows and wrought iron balconies to give it that sexy New Orleans look. Despite being hemmed in by later buildings it retained its courtyard and coach house round the back, which is where, these days, they keep the jazz. Coleman Hawkins played at the Bull, as did the multi-talented Tubby Hayes, beloved of my dad and Nightingale, until the early 1970’s when he popped his clogs. Other visiting greats included Shorty Rogers, Bud Shank and Ben Webster. And during the jazz revival of the noughties, rising young stars like Jamie Cullum and Simon Spillett made The Bull’s Head the groovy place to be – man. My dad had played there in the past and now it was marking the start of his fourth attempt at jazz stardom – however far that went. It was also the debut of his brand new teeth, paid for by yours truly with the help of a Kickstarter campaign and what was left of my savings.

I’d been there when he’d tested his new embouchure, watched him as he lifted his trumpet to his lips, paused to nervously wet them with his tongue and then blow a single pure note. I’d watched him stop and stare at his trumpet in disbelief and then at my mum who’d pinched the bridge of her nose to hide her tears. Then he smiled at me and for that moment, and just that moment, I forgave him everything – everything – because now I knew what joy looked like and I was part of it.

It wore off fairly quickly in the days after that, but the music stayed and my mum was happy.

I was less happy with the amount of interest my dad’s gigs were getting in the demi-monde, but as Nightingale had pointed out it was my own damned fault.

‘You did rather insist on that open day at Caster-brook,’ he’d said. ‘Your father’s performance there must have caught their imagination.’

That’s the trouble with community policing – strangely, people start expecting you to be part of the community. Fortunately my dad’s brand of soul jazz wasn’t Goth enough for the wilder shores of the demimonde, so I expected the mundane to weird bollocks ratio to be quite high.