But Leo had never warmed to me, not when Tara first took me home for tea – and to get her laundry done and to collect some cash from her dad – when I was a young music writer in a cheap leather jacket with a face white and drawn from staying up for two nights in a row, and not at any time since.

Leo was a builder. In the middle-class bubble of the music press, Tara had been very boastful about the fact. ‘Yeah, my old man’s a builder,’ she would say, her accent suddenly more London, languidly poking a finger into a hole in the fishnet tights she wore with her Dr Marten boots. She made it sound like Leo was a working-class man who had spent a lifetime grafting in the physical world, a hard-nut manual labourer who had been born into poor but proud London-Irish stock. And Leo was indeed all of that, but he had also gone on to make serious money.

Leo was a builder who had had his own business for thirty years. He made his first real money converting multiple-occupancy Victorian terraced houses into family homes in areas that were ready for gentrification – like the one in Camden Town we lived in, a labour of love for Leo – and more recently his firm had specialised in new-build flats for downsizing, well-heeled boomers with the kids finally off their hands. Leo was where Tara got her entrepreneurial spirit from and there was enough money in the family that the first time I walked into her parents’ home, I was stunned. Tara’s parents lived in a mansion. Tara had grown up in the lap of luxury. After growing up in a modest, pebble-dashed semi in a quiet corner of Essex, that’s how it seemed to me. Everything was white, and new, and looked expensive. There was all this space – big rooms, high ceilings, a kitchen with a television set. A bathroom with a television set! It smelled nice. There was a lady from Manila doing the cleaning. The only sign that all of this had been hard-earned was Leo’s big white builder’s van on the gravel drive, next to a couple of shiny new BMWs.

Bushey was only thirty minutes up the motorway north of London, but to me it seemed like another world. And my sense of wonder only increased as I walked deeper into all that suburban splendour and saw what was beyond the big French doors at the back of the house.

‘There’s a horse in your back garden,’ I said.

The three of them laughed at that – Leo, Jen and Tara in perfect amused harmony – and we all stood and watched a horse amble lazily across the rolling green field that stood immediately beyond their manicured back garden, sweeping up to a single-storey brick building.

‘That’s Half Acre Field, not our back garden,’ Tara said. ‘And that’s not a horse – that’s Maple.’

‘Mable?’