The years passed and he missed his home, he missed his work, he missed watching his grandson grow up. But most of all, he missed my mother. Prison, my father said, was not really about being locked up – it was about being locked away – locked away from everything you loved. That was your punishment.

And my mother blossomed without him. Always a beauty, she somehow applied an emergency brake on the ageing process as she entered her sixties.

There were men in her life. I suspected the use of a dating app, but she laughingly denied it. She said she met them at her gym. ‘Or just – you know – in the world, Tara. The old-fashioned way of meeting people, darling!’ It may even have been true. Most of them were silver foxes with a few bob in the bank and not too much extra flesh on their old bones, although some of them were ten, fifteen years younger. I watched with admiration as her hair got blonder and her teeth got whiter and her body got firmer. But my mum kept all of her suitors at arm’s length, and she never missed a visiting day with my dad.

His minimum term of ten years was fast approaching. After that, he could apply for parole and release on licence. And after ten years, my mum was still waiting for him to come home. They had chosen each other, long ago, for better or worse, home and away, all of that.

And so he did his time for the thing he claimed that he had done. It all helped – the workshop, the mentoring course, the young men who looked at him as the two Daves had once looked at him. But most of all, it was my mum who got my father through his time, knowing that she was waiting for him. And, in my experience, you can get through anything if you know that someone is waiting for you.

Christian sits by himself in The One Bar.

His weekly podcast – Way Back Wednesday, a loving and surprisingly successful curation of traditional late-twentieth-century rock music, that beloved and dying art form – has brought him out east for the first time.

A band – one of those bands that he was young with half a lifetime ago, some of those boys he was wild with – have had an unexpected hit single on the back of a remix of one of their old tunes by an excruciatingly trendy Grime artist. Their new record company has sprung for Christian’s flight and accommodation and in return he is doing a Way Back Wednesday special on them. It is a happy coincidence that his trip more or less coincided with Marlo’s sixteenth-birthday present from his besotted grandmother.

Christian had floated the idea that Marlo might come to a gig with him, but this wasn’t going to happen. Christian had hoped Marlo would share his love of music, just as I had thought that he would eventually fall in love with horses, but Marlo was one of these children born in the twenty-first century who grew up totally smitten with anime, manga, Studio Ghibli, J-pop, all of the soft power of Japan. He had always wanted to see the country that filled his dreams.