Training was always a little less fun, and always a little more serious, when there were women watching us. I threw the medicine ball at Spike and he threw it back at me with a poker face, a touch harder than necessary.

Because when the women were watching, somehow it never felt like play.

When his working day allowed, Tara’s father Leo joined me to meet Marlon from school. About once or twice a week, I would arrive at the school gates and find him waiting for going-home time.

Leo Doherty was a bull of a man, his bald head shining in the spring sunshine, and the ragged T-shirt, baggy cargo pants and old boots he wore told me he had rushed to school from some building site. Leo had doted on Tara, his only child, and now he was smitten with Marlon, the way only a grandparent can be smitten. Me, Leo was a little less keen on.

He glanced at me as I greeted him and before his natural working-class courtesy kicked in, there was the usual flash of disappointment in his eyes. Leo always looked at me as if I was a washed-up thirty-year-old music journalist who had somehow married his smart, successful, drop-dead-gorgeous daughter when she could have had anyone. Fair comment, really. Someone had once told Leo that he looked like Pablo Picasso and Leo later confirmed this was true – ‘I Goggled him,’ he said. Leo liked looking at pictures of Picasso, rather than Picasso’s pictures, and he had exactly that sense of strength and power packed into a compact frame almost as wide as it was high. Picasso and Leo even had the same kind of unapologetic baldness.

‘Christian,’ Leo said. ‘Any luck?’

Tara’s dad and I had this ritual. Actually, it was more of a pantomime. We both acted as if my lack of gainful employment was purely temporary.

Leo talked as if my days were spent scouring the newsrooms of Fleet Street where hard-bitten old hacks in green eyeshades looked approvingly at my CV and told me to try again next week, son, and we might just have something for you. Perhaps Leo really believed that lost world still existed, and that there were still newspapers and magazines out there that were hiring, rather than firing.

‘No luck,’ I said, and Leo nodded as if something would turn up eventually, and his daughter would not have to be our family’s principal breadwinner forever. We stood together in awkward silence, waiting for Marlon.

My father and mother, a greengrocer and a dinner lady, had both checked out early – the last generation to kill themselves with cigarettes, dying of smoking-related lung cancer within twelve months of each other soon after I started work. And when Tara had taken me home to her family’s home in Bushey, I had secretly hoped that her parents might be up for some sort of informal adoption.

No chance.

Tara’s mother – Jen, a serious beauty in her day and into her fifties, a compact, spectacularly pretty blonde who looked like she could have dated Rod Stewart in the Seventies – was friendly enough if distant in the English fashion.