All I had at the time in the way of personal protection was a lock on the bedroom door and a rubber wedge to jam underneath it – token gestures that I’d naïvely thought would give me enough time at least to ring the police, should the worst happen.

It had been an unremarkable evening and I’d been feeling chilled – until Iain phoned, anyway. I remembered wandering the hallways of my magnolia-painted house, holding up swatches of every grey in existence – dove, soft, dark, pewter – wondering what combination of them to paint the walls in. I could’ve employed the services of an interior designer, but I didn’t want to take the risk that word would get out. I was loving my solitude and seclusion. My own place. I’d come a long way since the squat.

Everything had been going so well. Cohen was at number three in the UK charts, having just slipped down from number one, where we’d been for the preceding month or so. Unless I went out with a wig and dark glasses on, I was pestered for autographs wherever I went, mostly by students and hippies. So my home was my haven; I was sure I’d managed to keep my new address hidden from the world. Even at the record label, nobody knew it – apart from the accountant who sent out my royalty statements, and, at my behest, she posted them with a fake management company name on the envelope so that nobody knew they were going to me. The band didn’t have a manager – we’d never needed one. We were a collective, not a product.

Another, less credible, reason I didn’t want anybody, specifically the press, to know where I lived was that Cohen’s ethos was firmly anti-capitalist. I dreaded to think about the field day they’d have had when they discovered I’d recently purchased a sizeable Georgian ‘mansion’. I’d struggled with the decision, but ultimately decided that I would leave it to charity in my will, if I never managed to have any children. I was still embarrassed by it, though; until that point, my terror of word getting out about the house was probably on a par with my terror at the thought of an intruder getting into it.

Despite the capitalist guilt, I loved my new home. At that point I felt much safer mid-terrace than I would have done in an isolated house in a remote village somewhere; and, once I had moved in, it went a long way to providing me with the security I lacked in any other area of my life.