Some mornings I heard him as I was getting up to walk the dog. And sometimes I saw him – screaming down our quiet residential road in his disgusting little modern car, a virtue-signalling, greeny-cleany, halo-polishing bug of a vehicle that he no doubt thought made him a morally superior person who was going to save the planet.

He always drove as if he was moments ahead of the rush hour. And he always drove as if he didn’t give a damn. And one day he was going to kill someone, possibly someone I loved, and all because he wanted to keep his smug green bug five minutes ahead of the morning traffic.

From what I had glimpsed of him, he looked like an educated man, a successful man, a man at the far end of some high-flying career. There was certainly money in his life, and it had been there for decades. And there was also the casual arrogance that comes with money, the selfish disregard for the little people.

Tara stirred as I slipped from the bed.

‘Sleep some more,’ I whispered.

‘I don’t think I can.’

‘Then just rest your eyes.’

I had been telling her the same thing for ten years.

We had met when we were both music journalists, back when the world was still paying young people to write about music, back when there was still music worth writing about.

Neither Tara nor I had excelled at school and so we were attracted to a job where the only qualifications required were the ability to stay up all night, look good in a leather jacket and string an overexcited sentence together. You would never guess it to look at us now – in the park at weekends with our little boy and our yellow Labrador, or supervising an Ocado delivery, or dutifully carting out our recycling bins – but we were once a pair of wild kids. Especially Tara. But we came in too late to turn hanging out with bands into a serious career. When we got our start on the music press, hip young gunslingers were already an endangered species. When the advertising revenue dried up, our inky weekly music paper became a freebie and then went online only and finally got shoved into oblivion with most of the other newspapers and magazines on the planet.

The print plunge, they called it.

We had moved on by then – at twenty-five you were menopausal in the music press – and I was writing a weekly column about music for a national newspaper, curating the dad rock canon, ruminating every Thursday in a sleepy corner of the Arts & Culture section on why U2 and Springsteen and Dylan should still matter for trad rock fans in their middle years. Meanwhile Tara, now pregnant with Marlon, picked up whatever freelance work she could find from the women’s pages in the nationals and what was left of the glossy monthlies. Her speciality was think pieces on sex and romance. When sex dies but love remains. When your friend is with the wrong guy. How to know if he’s the one. Should you ever fake it? I don’t know where she got this stuff from. But we were young practitioners of a dying trade and the work was drying up fast. These were the twilight years of print journalism when there were really only two conversations being had.