One – ‘You’re fired.’ And two – ‘How can we pay you less?’

Time and technology meant journalists like us were not simply losing our jobs – we were losing our careers. Tara – former party girl, rock chick, wild child – was surprisingly the one who adapted to the new world order.

And I was the other kind. The kind who didn’t.

As I tapped out my one thousand words on the eternal genius of Meat is Murder and The Joshua Tree and Born to Run and Exile on Main Street and Blood on the Tracks, I was like the optimistic blacksmith who thought – well, people will always need horseshoes, right? – just as a million Model T Fords puttered over the horizon. I was that blacksmith. And the world had no further use for me.

Then, just as Marlon started walking, Tara started her business. A dating app. Angel Eyes. I didn’t really understand.

‘So it’s an online business?’ I asked, more than once.

‘No, Christian,’ she said, because I still didn’t get it. ‘All business is online business now.’

It was as if a great tide had come and picked Tara up and washed away the likes of me. For the first time, there was money in our life – our own money, I mean, not money that came from Tara’s parents. Not crazy money, because what came in from Angel Eyes subscriptions and advertising went on extra staff (a guy to answer the phones) and office space (two rooms in a start-up ghetto instead of doing it all from our living room). But five years on, Tara had made her idea work in the grown-up world.

And I was so proud of her.

When we were kids at the music paper, I thought we were exactly the same. I saw now that we were very different.

Tara was driven.

And I was parked.

We sometimes talked about me returning to work but in truth I would need to do what Tara did – have a total career rethink and invent some clever new way to get a payday.

Because my old skill set was redundant. No, not redundant – dead. Print journalists like me had been left out for the bin men of history.

But there was one thing I could still do in this changed world.

I could still protect my family from those who would do us harm.

And what could ever be more important than that?

As I was pulling on my dog-walking trousers, Marlon wandered into the bedroom, more asleep than awake, and I scooped him up and placed him in bed with Tara.

I stirred Buddy from his basket and, with his tail wagging and a sleepy grin on his face, we headed out. As I closed the front door quietly behind me, a big black Merc purred up to the kerb. Tara’s car to take her to the office. I realise that I have not given you the entire Tara-picture. I have made her sound as if she ploughed every hard-earned penny back into her business. Not quite. The car to whisk her to and from the Angel Eyes office was her one nod to executive luxury – although Tara thought of it as a legitimate business expense. She liked to work when she was travelling and she couldn’t do it on the Tube. A face like a small moon peered at me from the Merc. Her driver was one of those fabulously obese men that look like a heart attack waiting to happen. Fat Phil.